Date:
This event is virtual and will be held in Spanish. To register, click here.
Speaker: Nancy Morejón, Cuban poet, critic, and essayist
Moderated by: Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Director of Graduate Studies In Spanish, Harvard University
Coordinado con el seminario "Libertades literarias: Afrolatinoamérica escribe," facilitado por la profesora Doris Sommer, este ciclo de conversaciones virtuales explora técnicas y estrategias literarias con brillantes autores. Sus creaciones inspiran a soñar, pensar, reflexionar y recordar porque, por definición, el arte es irreverente con la realidad y por eso es capaz de alentar cambios. El valor agregado de estas conversaciones a las importantes entrevistas ya realizadas sobre temas y experiencias personales, será la atención particular al arte de escribir desde la encrucijada de culturas llamada Afro Latino América.
Nancy Morejón is the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba. Born in 1944 in Havana to a militant dock worker and a trade-unionist seamstress, Morejón graduated from Havana University, where she majored in French, and the first black woman poet to publish widely and be accepted as a professional writer, critic, and translator. Morejón is recipient of the Critic’s Prize (1986) and Cuba’s National Prize for Literature (2001). She has collaborated with prominent musicians, playwrights, and actors, and recently extended her artistic talents into the visual arts.
Doris Sommer, Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) about novels that helped to consolidate new republics; Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999) on a rhetoric of particularism; Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); and The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014). Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education. She has a BA from New Jersey's Douglass College for Women, and PhD from Rutgers University.
Presented in collaboration with the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center