Polyglot Writers: Writing Across Languages

 

Polyglot Writers: Writing Across Languages

The Creative Writing Program proudly welcomes poet and playwright Nathalie Handal and poet Ishion Hutchinson to its 2011-2012 reading series, Polyglot Writers: Writing Across Languages on Nov. 29 and 30, 2011.

The series celebrates our global society, where languages float across borders, race and class and have created a nation of polyglot people. At the University of Miami, our student body represents 146 nations and it is common to walk across the campus and hear conversations in more than two or three languages. Not unusual when you consider that the U.S. Census Bureau has determined that the number of people speaking a language other than English at home has doubled in the last three decades.

Polyglot Writers explores the fluidity of words as they define and redesign the narratives of writers who come from multiple languages, cultures and traditions. This year, we have also partnered with Books & Books to host writers’ salons, where we will engage in fine desserts, after dinner drinks, and conversations that focus on the play of language in all its forms.

Playwright and poet Nathalie Handal is the author most recently of Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Of her writing, Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa has written: “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.” Handal is also the editor of the groundbreaking anthology, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology. 

Poet Ishion Hutchinson’s work has appeared in the LA Review, Callaloo, Caribbean Review of Books, Poetry and International, and first book of poetry, Far District, was the winner of the Academy of Poets’s Larry Levis Prize.

Dr. Christina Civantos, Director of Undergraduate Studies in Spanish, and Dr. Patricia Saunders, author of Alien/Nation and Repatri(n)ation: Caribbean Literature and the Task of Translating Identity, will lead the Writers’ Salon in a lively discussion.

Fiction Master’s Class
Tuesday, November 29
3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
427 Ashe Building, 1252 Memorial Drive, Coral Gables

Reading
Tuesday, November 29
7 - 8 p.m.
Location: CAS Gallery, 1210 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Poetry Master’s Class
Wednesday, November 30
3:15 - 5:15 p.m.
427 Ashe Building, 1252 Memorial Drive Coral Gables, FL 33146

Writers’ Salon
Wednesday, November 30
8:30 p.m.
Books & Books 265 Aragon Avenue Coral Gables, FL 33134


“Polyglot Writers” Reading Series is sponsored by the University of Miami’s Creative Writing Program, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, American Studies Program, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures’ Joseph Carter Memorial Fund, Multicultural Student Affairs, and our partners at Books & Books.

Contact information: M. Evelina Galang, Director of Creative Writing, 305 284 5573,mgalang@miami.edu; Daisy Hernández, Graduate Assistant,daisyhernandez@gmail.com