Event: “The Americas Poetry Festival: Seven Latin American Poets”, to be held at the Americas Society (of which Interlitq is a Collaborating Institution) in NYC on Thursday, October 15, 2015 at 7pm.
Admission: Free for Americas Society Members; $10 for non-members. Not yet a member? Join now!
Join us for a dynamic reading in The Americas Poetry Festival of New York (TAPFNY) featuring poets Gabriel Chávez Casazola (Bolivia), Siomara España Muñoz (Ecuador), Roberto Fernández-Iglesias (Panama/Mexico), Paulo Ferraz (Brazil), Etnairis Ribera (Puerto Rico), Juan Armando Rojas Joo (Mexico), and Carlos Velásquez (Colombia). TAPFNY is a multilingual poetry festival and writers’ conference organized by poets Carlos Aguasaco and Yrene Santos, and sponsored by the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies of The City College of New York/CUNY, Artepoetica Press, and Escribana Books.
The 2015 Festival, which will honor the memory of poet William Beltrán (aka William Akcoo, 1973-2011), will take place on October 14, 15, and 16 at the Center For Worker Education CCNY, the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center, the Consulate of Argentina in New York, the Americas Society, and Instituto Cervantes NY.
Event Information: Department of Literature | literature@as-coa.org | 212-277-8353
Press Inquiries: Adriana La Rotta | alarotta@as-coa.org | 212-277-8384

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Gabriel Chavez Casazola (Bolivia, 1972) is a poet and journalist who is considered an essential voice in modern Bolivian and Latin American poetry. He has published several books of poetry including Lugar Común/Common Place (1999), Escalera de mano/Stepladder (2003), El agua iluminada/Illuminated Water (2010), and La mañana se llenará de jardineros  / The Morning will Bring out the Gardeners (2013; 2014). His work has been anthologized in Bolivia as well as in Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador.
Siomara España (Ecuador, 1976) is an award-winning poet whose collections includeConcupiscencia, De cara al fuego Contraluz, El regreso de Lolita, and Construcción de los sombreros encarnados, música para una muerte inversa. Her work has been widely translated and published internationally. España is an instructor of literature, aesthetics, and literary criticism at the University of Guayaquil. She also serves as cultural editor of the newspaper El Emigrante and department director of the Casa de la Cultura Guayaquil.
Roberto Fernández-Iglesias (Mexican; b. Panama,1941) is the author of the poetry collections El gran desnudo y primer placer, Dieciocho narraciones breves, Celebrar la palabra, Retrato parcial, Furiosa sustancia, and Poemas juntos y revueltos. HisCanciones retorcidas, resorte y otras formas came out from Arte Poética Press in 2015. Fernández-Iglesias studied and taught at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) among other institutions. He edited the magazine tunAstral andParticipation-Poetry as well as coordinated the Abra Palabra anthology and the Pablo Neruda Workshop under the auspices of the Mexican government.
Paulo Ferraz (Brazil, 1974) is a poet, publisher and translator. He holds an MA in Brazilian literature from the University of São Paulo. His books of poems areConstatação do óbvio (1999), Evidências pedestres (2007) and De novo nada (2007). The last was later adapted to the theater and subsequently published in Spanish in Mexico, and Ecuador. Ferraz has edited the poetry journal Sebastião and the anthology Roteiro da poesia brasileira: anos 90. He has translated poetry from Spanish, Catalan, and Russian and has read his work widely.
Etnairis Ribera (Puerto Rico) has published various poetry collections, among themA(MAR)ES, Ariadne of the Water, Memoirs of a Poem and its Apple, and The Voyage of the Kisses. She is professor of Hispanic literature at the University of Puerto Rico. She is a founding member of the International Poetry Festival of Puerto Rico and editor of Dawning, Anthology in Homage of Julia de Burgos Centennial. Ribera received the 2008 Great Literature Award for Lifetime Creative Excellence from PEN International-Puerto Rico. Her work has been widely translated.
Juan Armando Rojas Joo (Mexico) is a transborder poet, prose-writer, and essayist whose books include Luz/Light (2013), Vertebral River/Río vertebral (2009),Ceremonial of Wind/Ceremonial de viento (2006), Santuarios desierto mar (2004), and Lluvia de lunas (1999). He has co-edited the anthologies Sangre mía/Blood of Mine: Poetry of Border Violence, Gender, and Identity in Ciudad Juárez (2013), andCanto a una ciudad en el desierto (2004), poetic denouncements against feminicide. In Spring 2011 he was resident poet at the Universade de Coimbra. Rojas holds a PhD from the University of Arizona, has served as a Mellon Fellow at Amherst College, and now teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he chairs the Department of Modern Foreign Languages.
Carlos Velásquez (Colombia, 1969) is a poet, translator, musician, and scholar. He earned a PhD in film and literature at the University of Arizona and is now a visiting assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University. Velásquez has published two poetry collections, Versos del insilio (1999) and Es de tontos el regreso (2004). This year Artepoética Press will release his translation of Seamus Scanlon’s As Close as You’ll Ever Be. His study Pliegues cinematográficos. La función barroca en el cine hispanoamericano contemporáneo will be published by Escribana Books in 2016.
In Memoriam:
William Beltrán (aka William Akcoo) was born in Bogotá in 1973 and passed away in 2011. He received a BA in art from the National University of Colombia and a master’s in aesthetics at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He pursued doctoral studies both at the Universidad Complutense and the Institut für Philosophie of the University of Bremen, Germany. He was a specialist in the philosophy of Nietzsche and a member of the Spanish Association of Nitzchean Studies. His published poetry collections are Por Ultratumba y de los Poemas Cansados (1993), Versos para el Inculpado (1999), and La tiniebla de la culpa (2008).