Poetry reading in English, Spanish, Mayan

Poetry Reading with poets Claire Joysmith, Fer de la Cruz, Lourdes Cabrera and Patricia Martínez. Poetry will be read in three languages: Spanish, English and Mayan. Open microphone extended to visitors.

About the poets:

Born in Mexico, Claire Joysmith was raised trilingually and quatriculturally. Her academic and creative work focus on transcultural, transborder expressions and translation, poetry and self-narrative. Her essays, translations and poetry have appeared in Mexico, U.S., Latin America and Europe in Voices Without Borders I and II (2009 U.S. National Best Book Award for Fiction & Literature), Blanco móvil, Dondepalabra, Literal Magazine, Signs, The Raven,Diálogo, FORUM, 20th anniversary edition of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and others. Her poetry has appeared as Silencio de azules (2016). Among her translations areSofia: Poems (by Joan Logghe) and Cantar de espejos, an anthology of Chicana poetry edited by her. She has taught literature at the UNAM in Mexico City, translation in Mérida and creative writing at Earlham College.

Fer de la Cruz, MA, is a Yucatecan poet born in Monterrey, México, in 1971. He is a member of the founding faculty at the School of Creative Writing of the State Center of Fine Arts, in Mérida. He is also the coordinator of the historic Mérida branch of Centro de Idiomas del Sureste, where he was a teacher for 20 years. As an independent editor, writer, and cultural consultant ad honorem he participated in cultural festivals, conferences and book fairs in France, Cuba, and the United States, as well as in various states of México.

Lourdes Cabrera Ruiz, born in 1962 is a Spanish teacher at the Scuola Normale Superiore Yucatan (ENSY, 2011) and holds a degree in Latin American Literature from the Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY, 2006). She is a poet, a cultural promoter and coordinator of literary workshops in educational spaces. She began her career in 1997; her works are published in various newspapers and regional and national magazines, and anthologies. He has published Song of the principles and Other Poems (Literalia Editors / Yucatan Cultural Institute, 2011).

Born in Tizimín, Yucatán, in 1964, Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim graduated from UAY with a degree in Anthropological Sciences specializing in Linguistics and Literature. She has taught courses in language, culture and Mayan literature at the Universidad de Oriente and other universities. She has published works on Maya oral tradition and in 2005, she won the Enedino Jiménez National Prize for Indigenous Literature.