Center for the literary arts in New York State
LANDMARK OF LATINO POETRY
Rigoberto González
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Conversation / Q&A
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222 - See map.
Rigoberto González, award-winning poet and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers Newark, is the editor of a major new anthology, Latino Poetry (Sept. 2024), from the Library of America. On Good Morning America, National Book Award-winner Elizabeth Acevedo called it “a landmark literary feat,” and said, “This collection is as much literary riot as it is reference text.”
His most recent collection is To the Boy Who Was Night: Poems, Selected and New (2023), an autobiographical meditation on migration, masculinity, sexuality, isolation and the aging body. Toi Derricotte said, “In this stunning collection, a brilliant mind shapes a magical landscape from the ruins.”
Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI), and the Department of Africana, Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies (ALACLS).
From the publisher
For nearly five centuries, the rich tapestry of Latino poetry has been woven from a wealth of languages and cultures—a “tremendous continental mixturao,” in the words of the poet Tato Laviera.
Now, in an unprecedented anthology edited by the poet and critic Rigoberto González, Library of America brings together more than 180 poets whose poems bear witness to the beauty and power of this vital and expanding tradition: its profound engagement with pasts both mythical and historical, its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity, and its vision of a nation enriched by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants.
There are a brilliant array of contemporary voices here as well, spinning out the tapestry of Latino poetry in daring new directions. Taking the measure of this current renaissance, the anthology culminates with the most comprehensive survey of twenty-first century Latino poetry yet published.
Featured poets include:
-
José Martí
-
Julia de Burgos
-
Sandra Cisneros
-
Pedro Pietri
-
Juan Felipe Herrera
-
Jaime Manrique
-
Javier Zamora
-
Aracelis Girmay
-
Natalie Diaz
-
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, and
-
2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Brandon Som.
This groundbreaking collection captures as never before the richness, diversity, and power of the Latino poetic imagination.
