Edwin Torres: A Startling Performer, Tonight in the Ballroom

Edwin Torres, one of the most startling performers of the Nuyorican poetry scene, will participate in UAlbany's Diasporican Poetry Cafe, tonight in the Campus Center Ballroom, 5:30-7:45 p.m.

"I have seen Edwin Torres dancing to the sound of a musical saw while wearing a hat of dirt on his head in a store window, and once wearing pure white with the painter/poet Elizabeth Castagna on New Year's day 1999. I've always wanted to be Edwin Torres for a day, to think like him, to wear cool glasses, to be as tall and thin, to have Puerto Rican soul so I could write 'I'm near a tiger's smooch, BURP!'"

Read more of Brenda Coultas' Electronic Poetry Center review of Edwin Torres' poetry collection, Fractured Humorous here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/torrese/fractured.html

Get a taste of Torres' performance style on YouTube here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8uOPBn5jW4

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A Cascade Of Words: Jesus Papoleto Melendez

On the "Artists on the Cutting Edge" program of UCTV (University of California), Jesus Papoleto Melendez, a founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe who will visit Albany tomorrow, talks about a variety of subjects, including how performance is more satisfying than writing, and about his formative years as a kid in Harlem and as a teacher in San Diego.

http://www.uctv.tv/shows/A-Cascade-Of-Words-Jesus-Papoleto-Melendez-2645

More about the Diasporican Poets Cafe tomorrow at UAlbany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/puerto_rican_diaspora12.html

Photo: Melendez on the Boricua Poetry website.

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Giannina Braschi this Friday at the Diasporican Cafe

Giannina Braschi, major contemporary bilingual poet and fiction writer, will join a number of other "Diasporican" poets on stage 5:30-7:45 p.m., Friday, October 26th in the Campus Center Ballroom.

Written in inventive mixtures of English, Spanish and Spanglish, Braschi's work explores collisions of language, culture and history with regard to the lives and experiences of 50 million Hispanic-Americans living in the United States.

In the Evergreen Review, Barney Rosset said of Braschi's 2011 novel, The United States of Banana, “Revolutionary in subject and form, United States of Banana is a beautifully written declaration of personal independence. Giannina Braschi’s take on U.S. relations with our southern neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, most especially Puerto Rico, is an eye-opener. The ire and irony make for an explosive combination and a very exciting read.”

In advance praise of Braschi's bilingual novel, Yo Yo Boing! (2011), Harvard scholar Doris Sommer said, “A bilingual rollercoaster....A rush of gloriously nuanced sentences that teeter between the grotesque and burlesque…the text transmutes poetry into novel, into screenplay, dialogue, and by extension to more and sometimes unidentified variants.”

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Upstate Nuyorican Poets Cafe

Some key figures of New York City's historic Nuyorican Poets Cafe (pictured here), perhaps the most vibrant institution of U.S. Hispanic literary culture, will visit Albany to participate in a "Diasporican Cafe," free and open to the public, as part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association.

Featured performers will include Jesus Papoleto Melendez, one of the founders of the Cafe in the 1970s, Edwin Torres, a transformational figure at the Cafe in recent decades, and Giannina Braschi and Magdalena Gomez, both leaders of the Nuyorican poetry movement.

More on the event in Albany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/puerto_rican_diaspora12.html

More on the Nuyorican Cafe: http://www.nuyorican.org/

And here's a recent article about a newly announced $7 million renovation of the cafe: http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2012/10/nuyorican-cafe-looks-to-undertake-a-7-million-dollar-renovation.html

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On the "Paradox" of Teaching Writing at MIT

Q: You teach creative writing at MIT. Isn't that like teaching astrophysics at Juilliard?

 

Junot Diaz:  It's more like teaching cooking in a state penitentiary.

 

More in USA Today:  http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/story/2012-09-05/junot-diaz-how-you-lose-her/57611976/1

 

Junot Diaz visits today.

 

Picture:  Cooking at the Arizona State Prison-Perryville Desert Rose Cafe, from the Arizona Republic.

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Junot Diaz on the Apocalypse

Junot Diaz, who visits tomorrow, talks to Bohemian.com about his interest in apocalyptic sci-fi.

"If you could be any other writer, who would you be?" In a fantastic subversion of expectations, Diaz said that he would be Octavia Butler, the African-American science fiction author of such classics as Parable of the Sower and Kindred. It was a beautiful moment in the history of literature.

How does the idea of apocalypse play into your current project and your work in general?
As far as the apocalypse, I grew up in the most apocalyptic area in the world. We can’t think of a place that has endured more apocalypses than the Dominican Republic and the island of Hispaniola, or the island of Haiti has endured everything expect for a nuclear catastrophe. I think these shadows, these historical echoes reached me and they both intrigued and troubled me. And I came up in New Jersey, within slight distance of New York City during the time of the possibility of total nuclear annihilation. I was one of those kids that grew up in a time where you would see, on the news, they’d suddenly flash a map of New York City and they would show a big black ring, of every area, every town, every person within that range would be utterly obliterated, and of course, we were deep in the heart of that ring. The apocalyptic history of both the Dominican Republic and the United States has resonated with me and continues to shape a lot of the interests in my work.

More:  http://www.bohemian.com/BohoBlog/archives/2012/10/02/extended-play-an-interview-with-2012-macarthur-fellow-junot-diaz

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Junot Diaz Wins MacArthur "Genius" Award

Junot Diaz, who visits Albany Thursday, has just been awarded a $100,000 no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation grant.

From the L. A. Times:

On Monday, news of who would be named the 2012 MacArthur Fellows leaked out early in reports by the Associated Press and elsewhere. Two writers are among the 23 artists, scientists and thinkers on the list: Junot Diaz and Dinaw Mengestu.

Diaz is the author of, most recently, the short story collection "This Is How You Lose Her," published in September. Mengestu's most recent work is the 2010 novel "How to Read the Air." Both are published by Riverhead.

Each author will receive a no-strings-attached "genius grant" of $500,000. All MacArthur Fellows are awarded $100,000 a year for five years.

More:  http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-macarthur-genius-junot-diaz-dinaw-mengestu-20121001,0,2594121.story

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Junot Diaz Hates Writing Short Stories

"Every writer is cursed or blessed with a unique creative metabolism: the distinctive speed and efficiency with which he or she converts the raw fuel of life into the mystical, dancing blue smoke of art. Junot Diaz's metabolism is notoriously slow. His fuel just sits there, and sits there, and maybe every once in a while gives off a tiny ribbon of damp smoke, until you start to worry that it all got rained on and ruined — and then, 5 or 10 years later, it suddenly explodes into one of the most mesmerizing fires anyone can remember."

Read Sam Anderson's interview with Junot Diaz in the New York Times magazine.

Diaz visits us for two events this coming Thursday, 10/4, 4:15 and 8PM in the Campus Center.

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