Nancy Morejón: September 4, 2014

The Poetry Center, together with Women and Gender Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, and Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, presents celebrated Afro-Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, reading her poetry and engaging with questions from the full-house audience. After opening remarks by Steve Dickison of The Poetry Center, Jillian Sandell, chair of Women and Gender Studies, introduces bookseller and activist Tony Ryan, who invites the audience to other local appearances by Morejón and alerts the audience to the newly arrived book Homing Instincts / Querencias (Cubana Books, 2014), a bilingual collection of Morejón's work with translations by Pamela Carmel. Sandell then returns and introduces Nancy Morejón together with translator Barbara Paschke, who reads Morejón's poems in English. This program was one of several local appearances by Morejón, on a rare visit to the Bay Area, and took place as the first in a series of lectures sponsored by Women and Gender Studies for Fall 2014. 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
2014-09-04
Event Run Time
01:11:15
Contributors
Jillian Sandell
Barbara Paschke
Tony Ryan
Steve Dickison
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Nancy Morejón (00:38:12)

Nancy Morejón greets the audience and opens by remembering her friend, recently deceased poet and founding-editor of The Black Scholar, Robert Chrisman (1927–2013) — who was responsible for the first publication of Morejón's work in the U.S., as translated by Kathleen Weaver — as well as poet and friend Jayne Cortez (1934–2012), without the two of whom, she says, "many of these poems would not have been written." She then dedicates her reading to scholar Javier Arbona-Omar, in the audience.

Morejón cites her late francophone friend, Édouard Glissant, then reads her poems in their Spanish-language originals, with Barbara Paschke reading the English-language translations, opening with one of her best-known poems, "Mujer Negra," before proceeding to poems from the new collection Querencias / Homing Instincts (the English translations of which, read by Paschke, are by Pamela Carmel).

Conversation (00:22:03)

Nancy Morejón follows her reading with a lively discussion in response to questions from the full-house audience. A bit of the exchange occurs in Spanish, in respect for Morejón's native tongue, and questions involve aspects of her home country, Cuba, and her experience as a poet and Black woman within Cuban culture.

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