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The Small Claim of Bones @LiteraryArts

On Thursday, December 11, @LiteraryArts will feature a conversation with Ivonne Saed, Greg Simon, and Dr. Juan Antonio Trujillo on the small claim of bones by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, who was selected as a 2014 Debut Poet by Poets & Writers Magazine. The event begins at 7pm and is free and open to the public.

This forum for discussing Cindy Williams Gutiérrez’s debut poetry collection will feature Fulbright scholar Ivonne Saed, Spanish and Linguistics professor Dr. Juan Antonio Trujillo, and special guest renowned translator of Spanish and Latin American poetry, Greg Simon. Each writer will present an aspect of the book and then engage in a conversation with the author and the audience.  This presentación de libro is presented by Los Porteños, Portland’s Latino writers collective, and hosted by Literary Arts.  

Bios:

Graphic designer, photographer, writer, and translator, Ivonne Saed has extensively explored the crossroads between the visual and the textual within the Humanities, both in her own professional creation as well as in teaching. She is the author of the novel Triple crónica de un nombreTriple Chronicle of a Name (Lectorum, 2003) and the non-fiction book Sobre Paul Auster: Autoría, distopía y textualidadOn Paul Auster: Authorship, Dystopia and Textuality (Lectorum, 2009). She co-authored the books Literatura: imaginación, identidad y poder, Vampiros transmundanos y tan urbanos, and ¡Madres! Cuentos (y precauciones) de maternidad. Saed has also published book reviews, photos and stories in newspapers and magazines, like Reforma and Crónica (in Mexico), and Literal Magazine (in the US). Her first documentary Naïve premiered in March 2011 as part of Object Stories, a Portland Art Museum project. Ivonne Saed currently teaches at Marylhurst University and she’s a Delve guide for Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. As radio host, she talks about literature in her monthly segment Letra Viva, a part of FusionArte Radio on KBOO—90.7 fm Portland or kboo.fm.                     

Greg Simon was born in Minnesota, but has lived most of his life in the Pacific Northwest. He was educated in Seattle, Iowa City, and Palo Alto, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Stanford University. He is the co-translator, with Steven F. White and Christopher Maurer, of Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1988, and recently reissued in a fully revised edition in 2014. Other Simon/White collaborations include books of poetry by Gaston Baquero (Cuba), Pablo Antonio Cuadra (Nicaragua), and Rubén Dario (Nicaragua). Greg has been a contributing and translation editor for Porch, White Pine Press, The Salt River Review, and Trask House Books. He has published poems, translations, essays and reviews in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Northwest Review. Current work can be found in Hinchas de Poesía, a digital codex of contemporary Pan-American writing. He lives and works in an old wooden house above the west bank of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon.

Linguist and poet Juan Antonio (Tony) Trujillo centers his work on the interplay of identities within shared and private spaces. As tenured faculty in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University he has published scholarly articles on the development of Spanish in the culturally-complex US Southwest and the dynamics of the mixed Anglo/Latino college classroom in the International Journal of the Linguistics Association of the Southwest and in edited volumes Spanish of the US Southwest: A Language in Transition and Español en Estados Unidos y Otros Contextos de Contacto. He is co-editor with Susana Rivera-Mills of Building Communities and Making Connections, a book dedicated to exploring critical pedagogy in language education. Tony Trujillo’s non-academic writing primarily examines internal spaces, with an emphasis on the interplay between religious upbringing, ethnicity and sexual identity. His poetry is included in the forthcoming anthology Joto: An Anthology of Queer Xicano and Chicano Poetry and his creative non-fiction piece on leaving Mormonism will appear in an edited volume on queer Chicano spiritualities. Both books will be available in the coming year from Kórima Press.

 About the small claim of bones:

Latina poet Cindy Williams Gutiérrez describes a mosaic of worlds—Tenochtitlan, New Spain, and the Mexican diaspora—in an exploration of her multicultural identity. A literary bridge spanning 600 years of history, these poems reflect two pivotal eras in Mexico’s past through the voices of real and imagined historical figures who in turn elicit responses from the poet’s contemporary voice. Three series of poems, each rooted in sacredness, draw from these eras and form the collection’s foundation: imagined fifteenth-century Nahua “songs,” irreverent sonnets and décimas inspired by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the intimate, contemporary voice of the poet as she pays tribute to all she holds dear in the border’s diverse cultural tapestry. Through a call-and-response approach, this unique collection extends the literary dialogue of the Americas vital to US Hispanic literature, earning the author a place in the company of the most esteemed Latina feminist writers.

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