Escribe Aqui/Write Here at The Betsy!

The Betsy Writer's Room presents a multilingual, multicultural Reading at The Betsy, Friday, June 27 at 6 p.m. in B Bar.

The Betsy hosts authors from various Hispanic and Caribbean countries in a multilingual reading in B Bar. The evening will be broken up into two readings:

Escribe Aqui will feature readings in Spanish with Hernan Vera Alvarez (Argentina), Pedro Medina Leon (Peru), Camilo Pino (Venezuela) and Jose Ignacio Valenzuela (Chile) at 6PM.

Write Here will follow, with readings in English by Anjanette Delgado (Cuba), MJ Fievre (Haiti), Mia Leonin (Cuba) and Geoffrey Philp (Jamaica).

Special Musical Performance by jazz saxophonist, Nestor Zurita.

Books & Books will have copies from selected works available for purchase.

CLICK HERE TO RESERVE YOUR SEAT NOW.<http://the-betsy-south-beach.ticketleap.com/betsy-write-here/details>

Cash bar available. This is a free event.

"One Today" by Richard Blanco

"One Today"

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper -- bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives -- to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches 
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind -- our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across cafe tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me -- in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound 
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always -- home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country -- all of us --
facing the stars
hope -- a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it -- together


Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-inauguration-2013-richard-blanco-poem-20130121,0,5626688.story

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We are petitioning President Barack Obama to exonerate the Right Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. http://signon.org/sign/exonerate-marcus-garvey?source=c.url&r_by=4631897

21 Days/21 Poems: A Commonplace Object

Crumpled Paper

It sounds like what the heel knows

of landscape, the fiery chewing

of autumn's dry and unspared remnants.
That a season should leave itself
exposed so, and I walk it
into a fine grind, a radio's static errancy.

Are we not the world's antenna
always refining the received?
Would that we had ears
to seize glass molecules turning
the melt of it into seeming solid,
or ice forming in trays or weather.
That we could hear the seal
of scab on tissue or the snake's
interlocking scales upon the ground
it elegantly deafens in its stalk.

Because the ear fails, the hand pursues
in the leather of the now
opened sheet a landscape like the moon's
or a still shot of the ocean's faceted maze.
Mirror upon mirror closing like petals
or atoms, a fist of refractions
laid out in wave within wave, crack
within a crack of the paper I crumple
up again and listen to.

"Crumpled Paper" by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. The Mastery Impulse. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003.


Ricardo Pau-Llosa is always pushing himself to conjure associations while observing everyday objects, and to use the details to create poems. The poems arise from an attention to the intricacies of the object and influenced by Husserlian Phenomenology, Pau-Llosa contemplates their effect on his consciousness. In "Crumpled Paper," like many of the other poems in The Mastery Impulse Pau-Llosa lifts the object from the quotidian into metaphor.


And the music!: "a fist of refractions/ laid out in wave within wave, crack/ within a crack of paper I crumple."

About Ricardo Pau-LLosa

Ricardo Pau-Llosa  is a Cuban-American poet, pioneer art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction. Pau-Llosa was born into a working-class family in Havana. In 1960 Pau-Llosa fled Cuba with his parents, older sister, and maternal grandmother — all of whom emerge in his autobiographical poems of exile and remembrance. He graduated from Belén Jesuit Preparatory High School in Miami in 1971, and went on to major in English (literature) at various universities, among them Florida International University (BA, 1974), Florida Atlantic University (MA, 1976), and the University of Florida (1978–1981). Divorced with no children, Pau-Llosa is also an avid collector of modern, folk, and tribal art from the Americas. He lives in Miami.

Source: Wikipedia

 21 Days/21 Poems: A Commonplace Object

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• Call for Papers: South Florida Latin American and Caribbean Studies Graduate Student Conference (repeatingislands.com)
• Book Review: "All Things Bright" by Christine Craig (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)

Googling for Natives @ Horror Unlimited: Cuban Horror Films

"Furthermore, since horror is essentially, at its core, the relation between one and a perilous and often transmogrified other, the only other that is deemed worthy of discussion in Cuba is the capitalist imperialism of the United States. The yanquís, the Castro government’s demonic appellation for the inhabitants of the country ninety miles west of Cuba, are the lone evil in the Cuban psyche. Since billboards about them are already everywhere on the island, making a film about their sinister intentions seems an utterly redundant act."

For more information, please follow this link:  http://horrorunlimited.com/Googling-for-Natives-Most-of-the-Reasons-Cuban-Horror-Cannot-Exist-Part-1.html


About the Author:


Rafael Miguel Montes is a Cultural Studies professor in the Department of English at St. Thomas University in Miami, FL. He is the author of the book-length study Making Places: Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Literature. His academic work has often attempted to dissect the correlation between popular culture and Caribbean cinema and literature. Working in the fields of memory studies, oral history, videogame studies, fashion history and horror, he brings together disparate avenues of interrogation in order to better understand Cuba and the Caribbean outside of the usual contexts of history and literature.

***

Juan of the Dead:  http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2010/05/zombies_attack_cuba.php

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Excerpt: Cuban Ballet by Octavio Roca

[excerpted from Octavio Roca’s Introduction to his Cuban Ballet, with forewords by Alicia Alonso and Mikhail Baryshnikov]:



(In this brief section, Octavio Roca takes note, that in ballet today, Latins are the new Russians—their impact is comparable to that of the Soviet defectors who changed the face of dance in the 1970s and ‘80s, and their incomparable style and sabor also is adding new flavors to the dazzling work in progress that is American culture):



“The phenomenon embodied by the Feijóo sisters—from their respective home bases far from Havana in San Francisco and Boston as well as on their world tours alongside dancers from the Cuban diaspora—is changing the face of ballet in the twenty-first century. The sisters are a sign of the times. After nearly half a century of defections from Alicia Alonso’s Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Cuban dancers and teachers are exerting a powerful influence on American and world dance that brings to mind the profound impact Russian dancers brought to the West as their defections mounted in the dusk of the Soviet empire. These dancers are creating for the world the beauty they too often cannot make in their homeland.



“The growing diaspora of Cuban defectors everywhere is giving the tropical island a cultural importance that is miraculously disproportionate to its size. The entire Cuban population of eleven million could fit comfortably in greater Moscow, London, or New York. In addition to Lorena Feijóo and Lorna Feijóo, principal dancers from Cuba today star in the American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, Miami City Ballet as well the Cuban Classical Ballet of Miami, Houston Ballet, London's Royal Ballet, Vienna State Opera Ballet, Buenos Aires' Ballet del Teatro Colón, and many other major troupes. Cuban ballet teachers, all formed in the rigorous pedagogical tradition of Alicia and Fernando Alonso, head faculties from the Royal Danish Ballet to La Scala, from Madrid to Mexico City, from Buenos Aires to Paris. The Paris Opera Ballet School, in 2003, sent a team of observers to Havana to study the teaching methods of Alicia Alonso's National School of Ballet.



(Here, also from the introduction to Cuban Ballet by Octavio Roca, the author touches on a theme developed throughout his book, that the global phenomenon embodied by Cuban dancers today—as well as their heartbreaking, life-affirming stories—is not at all limited to dance inside Cuba. Even a casual YouTube search will confirm that Cuban culture is a culture in exile, and it is alive and thriving in these amazing dancers. Ballet, an old art from the Old World is decidedly being revitalized in the New World by these beautiful Hispanics in the 21st century. These dancers are today’s ambassadors of Latin culture at its finest. Cuban Ballet is an intensely personal account of these stories—there is no other way the Cuban Octavio Roca could tell it ):



“Alicia Alonso’s lessons do not stop with Alicia Alonso. Of course, her example continues to represent a blueprint for Cuban greatness in dance—this is what a Cuban dancer looks like, this is what the New World can give back to the Old. But beyond Cuba, in fact especially in the Cuban Diaspora, what these Cuban dancers have done and continue to do is one of the most entertaining and exhilarating spectacles of dance in our time. What has been done to them, to all of us exiles, is cruel. That exile is for so much of the world a natural condition is little consolation. But the consolation is there, in our imaginations. Reinaldo Arenas once told me, far from the tropics and sitting in his cramped Hells’ Kitchen walk-up in New York, that they had taken away his beloved Caribbean Sea but now he had the freedom to imagine it, to create it anew. He did just that, and his impossibly beautiful oeuvre stands as a monument of hope and possibility in Latin American arts.



“That hope is alive in a generation of Cuban dancers in exile. There is, of course, a danger of perennial mourning for the path not taken—a danger to which both those who stayed and those who left may be vulnerable. What would have happened had these dancers not had to leave their country? What an even greater company the Ballet Nacional de Cuba might have been without Cuba’s long nightmare? But with José Martí we say, “No vamos a preguntar, sino a responder,” “Let us not ask, but answer.” What a gift to the world it has been that these dancers enrich and will continue to enrich one company after another around the world.  That is our answer.  There is vital momentum to their living history, there is hope. That, too, is our answer. They are exiles, artists who freely take up the sacerdotal responsibility of an art that becomes universal precisely because it remains so defiantly Cuban. It is a responsibility taken up not so much by followers of the Cuban School of Ballet as by heroes and heroines in their own right, creating new worlds of dance even as they struggle to keep their own identities as Cuban artists. There is a sacrament of kindness bestowed in all its holiness each time they step on stage. They dance with a Cuban accent, and their dance is at home in the world.



“Lorena Feijóo and Lorna Feijóo, Jorge Esquivel, Osmay Molina, Joan Boada, the ever-growing number of Carreños from Lázaro and Alvaro up to Alihaydée, José Manuel and Joel, Rolando Sarabia and Daniel Sarabia, Xiomara Reyes, Carlos Miguel Guerra, Miguel Angel Blanco, Luis Serrano, Isanusi García Rodríguez, Carlos Quenedit, Hayna Gutiérrez, Adiarys Almeida, Gema Díaz, Cervilio Amador, Taras Domitro, and so many more dancing in Havana but soon to arrive on foreign shores as I write this, all of them are improbably at ease while splendidly, heroically creating a Cuban culture in the absence of the free Cuba they deserve.  In the process, they are enriching the lands where at first they were strangers. American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Joffrey Ballet Chicago, Houston Ballet, Washington Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden and many more companies all are better for it, and different for it.



“There is beauty in the arduous, unwilling, often unacknowledged transformation of temporary exile into permanent immigration. There certainly is artistic fervor in these lives. This may offer little solace, an unsatisfactory substitute for the land we lost. But what a surprise it can be to find these labors are now part of the culture of new lands we might call our own.  Again let us remember Jose Martí’s dictum, that “Hacer es la mejor manera de decir,”  “Doing is the best way of saying.”  Just as Alicia Alonso once refused to recognize her blindness as a brutal limitation for her art, dancers in the Cuban diaspora refuse to recognize the loss of their homeland.  They are Cuban artists and they are free.  What they do with what has been done to them is a touching, gripping tale. Theirs is a bittersweet victory, or perhaps just a sign of the inexorable momentum of history. Theirs is above all a true tale of the greatness of the human soul, of the indomitable spirit of dance. This is their story.



About the Author:



Octavio Roca has been music and dance critic for The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami New Times. He wrote Scotto, More Than A Diva, and his works for the stage include commissioned translations of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, Mascagni's Our Friend Fritz, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, and Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, as well as the original libretto for Lucia Hwong's oratorio The Unwelcome Rhythm of Your Pulse. He studied at Emory University and Georgetown University, has taught philosophy at the University of Miami and Barry University, has lectured on the arts at the Smithsonian Institution and at the Catalan Theater Institute of the University of Barcelona, and is now chair of the Arts and Philosophy Department at Miami Dade College. He was born in Havana and presently lives in Miami Beach, where he used to be a lifeguard a while back.

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New Book: Cuban Ballet by Octavio Roca

Forewords by Alicia Alonso and Mikhail Baryshnikov

Gibbs Smith, fall 2010

$40.00 Hardcover, 240 pages, illustrated

“Cubans are a dancing people. Dance matters to us, and it matters deeply.”~ Alicia Alonso

According to Mikhail Baryshnikov, in his foreword to Octavio Roca’s new Cuban Ballet, “It’s impossible not to notice when a Cuban dancer walks into the studio.” He is right, and the world is taking note as wave after wave of Cuban dancers and teachers are exerting a powerful influence on American and world dance.  Their presence brings to mind the profound impact Russian dancers brought to the West as their defections mounted in the dusk of the Soviet empire. These Cuban dancers are creating for the world the beauty they too often cannot make in their homeland. The unique style of the Cuban School of Ballet today is galvanizing the world of dance in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and beyond. The growing diaspora of Cuban defectors everywhere is giving the tropical island a cultural importance that is miraculously disproportionate to its size. The entire Cuban population of eleven million, after all, could fit comfortably in greater Moscow, London, or New York. These Cuban dancers, often far from their homeland and more distinctly Cuban for it, say with every step that, “No, you will not take Cuba away from me.”  Even more than in the case of Cuba’s musical or literary traditions, exile has meant a regeneration and revitalization of Cuban ballet and its rich tradition. Cuban Ballet is a tale of revolution in a country as well as in ballet. It is a tale of a people’s tragedy and hope, of dance and of life. In Octavio Roca’s hands, these dancers’ stories reads like a novel that happens to be true. 

The product of years of research and a lifetime of commitment to Cuban arts and culture, Octavio Roca’s beautifully illustrated book explores the history of Cuban ballet starting with the life and career of the indomitable Alicia Alonso, founder of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Her voice resounds in the book, as do those of today’s Lorena Feijóo and Lorna Feijóo, Joan Boada, José Manuel Carreño, Taras Domitro, Rolando Sarabia, and Carlos Acosta, among others. The book is rich in anecdotes, often heartbreaking in its honesty. Yet Cuban Ballet is not mere reportage, but rather it is a feat of challenging, lucid criticism. There is of course not a little irony in that the Cuban School of Ballet, essentially invented and refined by one of Fidel Castro's strongest cultural supporters, is now being spread all over the world by Cuban artists who are fleeing Castro's regime. One of the most rewarding aspects of Cuban Ballet is the insights it grants into the creation of art in circumstances no one should have to endure. With equal parts of affection, clarity and wit, Octavio Roca offers up a cultural history that goes beyond the world of dance.

Alicia Alonso writes in her foreword that “Octavio Roca, whom I have known for decades and who has known us his whole life…, has seen our dancers at home and abroad as well as on tour and with other companies. For me, his critical writing on dance carries a unique sensitivity to an art for he clearly loves.” 

“I know that Octavio Roca’s love of Cuba is as profound as his knowledge of ballet,” writes Mikhail Baryshnikov, “and I know this book is from his heart.”


About the Author:

Octavio Roca has been music and dance critic for The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami New Times. He wrote Scotto, More Than A Diva, and his works for the stage include commissioned translations of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, Mascagni's Our Friend Fritz, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, and Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, as well as the original libretto for Lucia Hwong's oratorio The Unwelcome Rhythm of Your Pulse. He studied at Emory University and Georgetown University, has taught philosophy at the University of Miami and Barry University, has lectured on the arts at the Smithsonian Institution and at the Catalan Theater Institute of the University of Barcelona, and is now chair of the Arts and Philosophy Department at Miami Dade College. He was born in Havana and presently lives in Miami Beach, where he used to be a lifeguard a while back. 

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For review copies, images, interviews or further information, please get in touch with:

Jennifer King, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, jking@gibbs-smith.com, 801-927-2171

Danny Bellas, DBellas@aol.com, 818-288-3972

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Upcoming Posts!

And the hits just keep on coming!

Last week I received two poems, “Redemption Rain" and "Earthquake 2010" from Jennifer Rahim, author of Approaching Sabbaths, winner of a Casa de las Américas Prize 2010. Both poems are from her manuscript, REDEMPTION RAIN.

Continuing the pattern begun by Pam Mordecai, the title poem of Jennifer's collection, “Redemption Rain,” will be published on Friday, August 27, 2010. The second poem, "Earthquake 2010,”  a meditation on the tragedy in Haiti, will be published in  on September 3, 2010.

On Wednesday, August 25, 2010, I will be publishing an excerpt from Octavio Roca’s Cuban Ballet, which according to the publisher, Gibbs Smith, “explores the history of Cuban ballet starting with the life and career of the indomitable Alicia Alonso, founder of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba.”

I've been in contact with several Caribbean writers who will be reading at the Miami Book Fair International and several have pledged to write guest posts for the In My Own Words series.

Speaking about the MBFI, I hope to be able to write a post about Michael Hettich's  most recent collection of poems, Like Happiness. Michael Hettich will be reading at Books & Books on October 15, 2010.

Finally, give thanks to all who participated in the Marcus Garvey poll. 84% of you agreed that Marcus would have been a blogger. I would even venture to conclude, as Colin Grant did, that he would have been a master of social media. Marcus Garvey on Twitter. I like that!

I’ll be rolling out even more good news over the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

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Ricardo Pau-Llosa @ Cremata Gallery

Ricardo Pau-Llosa – Poems Inspired by Art & Parables

Cremata Gallery is proud to host Ricardo Pau-Llosa, one of Miami’s premier literary and cultural figures, in a reading of works inspired by different paintings and sculptures as well as poems from his new series titled Man.  The recital, which will be in English, will take place on Thursday, July 8th at 7 PM.

Pau-Llosa is the author of six books of poetry; the latest one, titled Parable Hunter, and the three that preceded it were published by the Carnegie Mellon University Press.  He is also an internationally published art critic who is considered an authority on the modern art of Latin America.  Recently featured prominently in the pages of The Writer’s Chronicle and Saw Palm, Pau-Llosa was the first Latino poet, and the first Floridian, included in the Poetry Series on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), first aired in 2008.  More information on his website:www.pau-llosa.com.

Pau-Llosa’s poems on art draw from eclectic classical and old master sources—El Greco’s View of Toledo, Titian’s Danae, Delacroix’s Sardanapalus, Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, Zurbarán’s Still Lifes—as well as works by modern Latin American artists such as Wilson Bigaud, Jesús Soto, and Ismael Gómez Peralta.  Pau-Llosa will use Power Point to retrace the creative process that began with the art works and culminated in the poems.

Pau-Llosa will also read works from his newest book-length series, titled simply Man. These poems intersect miracles, parables, and events narrated in the Bible with mundane scenes and occurrences which, on the surface, seem disassociated from myth and metaphysics.  The resurrection of Lazarus is reinterpreted in terms of a man who has lost a winning lotto ticket, the sacrament of penance is overlaid with post-coital ruminations on penis envy, Nicodemus and the Syro-Phoenician Woman are filtered through gruesome scenes of predation in a television nature program, and Pontius Pilate is reset in a high school chemistry class.   Poems from this series have been published or are forthcoming in Ambit, Diagram, Faultline, The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Salmagundi, Stand, and other literary magazines.

Cremata Gallery

1646 S.W. 8th Street

Miami, FL 33135

                          

Thursday, July 8th, 7 PM.  

Free and open to the public.  Reception to follow.

Contact: Lourdes Cremata at (305) 644-3315

lourdes@crematagallery.com

***

What Does it Mean to be Caribbean-American?: Marisella Veiga

Caribbean Homes

I was born on an island in the Spanish Caribbean, Cuba. Three years later my family went into exile in the United States. However, it wasn’t until I finished graduate school in northwest Ohio in the mid-1980s, that I decided to explore my roots in the region.

Returning to Cuba was not an option. We had family members in both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Unemployment was high in Puerto Rico in 1986. Yet I stood a better chance there without bureaucratic hitches common to immigrant workers.


By moving to the Caribbean, I’d hoped for a better understanding of my own heritage. My Spanish improved, my understanding grew. And one of the truths I came to know while living on this beautiful island was that I remained a Cuban exile. Puerto Rico was not Cuba.

Neither was the Dominican Republic. I learned that during a three month artist-in-residency there. But on both islands I saw glimpses of what my life would have been if I had remained in Cuba.

I stayed in Puerto Rico for two and a half years, eventually finding part-time work as an English editor with United Press International. The company’s San Juan bureau covered 27 Caribbean nations, including Surinam and Guyana. That job provided me with a broad education on the region.

As a result, I became interested in Haiti. At the time I was on the English desk during the first elections that island had in 30 years. When the turmoil settled some, I decided to see Haiti for myself. I talked with two women journalists who had traveled there often, alone.

As I looked out the window of the airplane at the deforested Haitian mountains, a thought popped into my head: I’m coming home. Home? I thought. Yes.

Home to Haiti.

I remembered that Cuba lay a few miles west, across the Windward Passage. To date, it’s the closest I’ve been to my actual homeland.

That moment clarified my relationship to the Caribbean—no matter which island I was visiting or living on, I was home.

***

Marisella Veiga was born in Havana, Cuba, and went into exile with her family in 1960. She was raised both in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Miami, Florida. She received a B.A. in English from Macalester College and a Master’s in Fine Arts in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and literary anthologies. Veiga has won The Pushcart Prize XX, Best of the Small Presses, Special Mention in Fiction, the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for Best Short Story in The Caribbean Writer. She was also given the Evelyn LaPierre Award for Journalism in Alexandria, Virginia. She is a nationally syndicated columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. Recently, Veiga released a spoken word recording with Eclipse Recording Studios that has collected a few. The CD is Square Watermelons: Ten Essays on Living with Two Cultures.

New Release: "Square Watermelons" by Marisella Veiga

Nationally syndicated columnist Marisella Veiga has released a spoken word CD, “Square Watermelons: Ten Essays on Living with Two Cultures.”

The essays, written and read in English, explore what life is like as a U.S. Hispanic, a person who balances two cultures. The 56-minute CD provides entertainment that Veiga hopes increases understanding and tolerance about how immigrants adapt to a different way of life in the United States.

The CD highlights the meshing and clashing natural to the assimilation process. English-only listeners have embraced it, as have bilingual listeners. Veiga plans a version in her native Spanish as well.

“Square Watermelons is ‘un encanto,’ (an enchantment) from start to finish, a perfect blend of heart and mind, insider and outsider, English and Spanish, written and spoken, heartache and comedy, music and text. This rich mixture creates a fresh perspective on the value of living in several worlds simultaneously,” writes Holly Iglesias, author of “Souvenirs of a Shrunken World” and University of North Carolina—Asheville professor.

“She wrote with an eloquence that I felt should be put to music, and now she’s done that,” says Charlie Ericksen, who syndicated most of the essays as editor and founder of Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C.

A classical guitarist accompanies Veiga’s reading. Mario Escandel, a graduate of the Havana Municipal Conservatory, has taken Cuban popular musical selections by Cuban composers and arranged them for the classical guitar.

“It’s the music of my home—both of Cuba and Miami; my father plays,” Veiga says. She hopes to increase appreciation of her native culture by sharing its musical talent as well.

The CD is available online at www.eclipserecording.com or by calling Eclipse Recording Studios at 904-794-1872.

For more information, contact Marisella Veiga at 904-501-4647 or mveiga@bellsouth.net or Charlie Ericksen at 202-234-0280 or Charlie@hispaniclink.org

Marisella Veiga was born in Havana, Cuba, and went into exile with her family in 1960. She was raised both in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Miami, Florida. She received a B.A. in English from Macalester College and a Master’s in Fine Arts in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and literary anthologies. Veiga has won The Pushcart Prize XX, Best of the Small Presses, Special Mention in Fiction, the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for Best Short Story in The Caribbean Writer. She was also given the Evelyn LaPierre Award for Journalism in Alexandria, Virginia. Recently, Veiga released a spoken word recording that collects 10 of her nationally syndicated columns. Square Watermelons: Ten Essays on Living with Two Cultures. She lives with her husband in St. Augustine, Florida.

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Caribbean Poetry Night @ Morella Art Gallery

After much planning and prayers, the poetry series at the Morella Art Gallery began with Caribbean Poetry Night on December 13, 2008.

It was a pleasure to read with Ricardo Pau-Llosa and to share with the audience the work of poets from the Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean whose poems we admire or in some way influenced our development as writers.

I began with excerpts from Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas and read poems by Dennis Scott, Anthony McNeill, Lorna Goodison, Pam Mordecai, and Kei Miller. Ricardo read from his latest collection, Parable Hunter, and the poems of Belkis Cuza Malé, Heberto Padilla, José Lezama Lima, Margara Russotto, Vicente Gerbasi, and J. G. Cobo Borda.

Morella Art Gallery, which hosts an impressive array of Naïve art, will soon be unveiling a year round schedule of events and exhibitions for the next calendar year.

For more photos of this event, please follow this link: Caribbean Poetry Night @ Morella Art Gallery.

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FORUM: Florida's Caribbean Connection

The latest issue of FORUM: Florida's Caribbean Connection, has been published, and contains a two poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa and a certain Jamaican poet whose name, for modesty’s sake, I will not mention.

Here are a few snippets from the Table of Contents:

Florida’s Caribbean Connection (Click here for full article)
Our state’s historical and cultural ties with the Caribbean have endured for more than 500 years, from pre-Columbian trading routes to modern migration.

Cauldron of Conflict
By Paul Dosal
The Caribbean has been one of the most hotly contested regions in the world.

The Story of Pedro Pan
By Jon Wilson
When Cuban children flew to freedom.

Leaving Home, Finding Home
By U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez Excerpt from A Sense of Belonging: From Castro’s Cuba to the U.S. Senate, One Man’s Pursuit of the American Dream

From Haiti, with Hope
By Connie May Fowler Lauded Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat—living an exile of blood, land, and memory.

Reading Florida
By Jon Wilson
Introducing our column about new Florida books.

Florida’s Earliest Caribbean Contact
By Bob Carr
Scholars find tantalizing clues of early contact between natives of Florida and the Caribbean.

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Ricardo Pau-Llosa: NewsHour Poetry Series

My friend and fellow poet, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, has been featured on the NewsHour Poetry Series. Ricardo read three poems from his latest collection, Parable Hunter.

clipped from www.pbs.org Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana in 1954 and has lived in the United States since 1960.