Poetry Off the Shelf: MAKE Exchange with Mexican Authors and Visual Artists

As part of its four-day festival called Lit & Luz, taking place first in Chicago this October and later in Mexico City, MAKE Literary Productions hosts an evening with poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky, poet and critic Luis Felipe Fabre, and painter and poet Valerie Mejer Caso. The program will be in Spanish and English with some translations moving from one medium to another as well as from one language to another.

Luis Felipe Fabre is a poet and critic based in Mexico City. He has published a volume of essays, Leyendo Aguejeros: Ensayos Sobre (Des)escritura, Antiescritura y No Escritura, and the poetry collections Cabaret Provenza, La Sodomía en la Nueva España, and Poems de Terror y de Misterio. He is the editor of two anthologies of new Mexican poetry, Divino Tesoro and La Edad de Oro, and Arte & Basura, an anthology of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro's poetry. He has been curator of Poesia en Vos Alta Festival and Todos Los Originales Serán Destruidos, an exhibition of contemporary art made by poets.

Daniel Borzutzky grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of Chilean heritage. His books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, forthcoming), The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011), The Ecstasy of Capitulation (Blazevox, 2007) and Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). His poetry translations include Raúl Zurita's The Country of Planks (Action Books, forthcoming) Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010) and Jame Luis Huenún's Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008), among others. He lives in Chicago.

Painter and poet Valerie Mejer Caso was born in Mexico City. Her poems explore containment and fragility, layering loss and possibility over a once-familiar landscape. She is the author of the poetry collections Rain of the Future (2013), translated by C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, and Alexandra Zelman; de la ola, el atajo (2009); Geografías de Niebla (2008); Esta Novela Azul (2004), which was translated by Michelle Gil-Montero as This Blue Novel (2013); and Ante el Ojo de Cíclope (1999).

Co-sponsored with MAKE Literary Productions