6:00pm – 8:30pm
3 October 2017
Facility Dining Lounge – AC 2D01
York College, CUNY
Jamaica, NY 11451

First Annual Sonia Rivera-Valdes Lecture Series, with Cuban poet Nancy Morejón.
Bi-lingual Reading, followed by a reception.

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. Currently, she directs the Caribbean Studies Center at Casa de las Américas, Havana, epicenter of Cuban and Latin American intelligentsia.

Morejón’s work addresses contemporary issues of ethnicity, gender, history, politics, and Afro-Cuban identity. Her poems stand as vibrant reflections on the intermingling of Spanish and African cultures in Cuba, what it means to be a child of both traditions, and how the bright threads of this heritage are part of the greater web of the African experience in the Americas.

This event was organized by Dr. Margarita Drago and Dr. Fabiola Salek.

Text and image above adapted from el pais de cuba flyer and webpage.