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Letras Latinas @ Bryant Park

  • Bryant Park New York, NY United States (map)

Poets DIANNELY ANTIGUA, YSABEL Y. GONZALEZ, JOE JIMÉNEZ, and ORLANDO RICARDO MENES read from their work.

DIANNELY ANTIGUA is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Her heart is in Brooklyn.

YSABEL Y. GONZALEZ was born in the Bronx, NY and raised in Newark, New Jersey. She received her BA from Rutgers University, an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and serves as the Assistant Director for the Poetry Program at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Ysabel has received invitations to attend VONA, Tin House, Ashbery Home School and BOAAT Press workshops. She is a CantoMundo fellow and her first full length collection, Wild Invocations, is available now from Get Fresh Books.

JOE JIMÉNEZ is the author of the poetry collection The Possibilities of Mud and Bloodline, a young adult novel. Jiménez is the recipient of the 2016 Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Press Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared on the PBS NewsHour and Lambda Literary sites. Jiménez was recently awarded a Lucas Artists Literary Artists Fellowship from 2017 to 2020. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

ORLANDO RICARDO MENES was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived in the U.S since the age of ten. He considers himself Cuban-American. Since 2000 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is Professor of English and Poetry Editor of the Notre Dame Review. Menes is the author of six poetry collections, including Memoria (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) and Fetish, winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. An NEA fellow, his poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as in literary magazines like POETRY, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Epoch, The Southern Review, and New Letters. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009).

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