Latin American Poetry in Translation | Reading and Reception

Join Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art, University of Houston Creative Writing Department, and World Poetry for a night of new poetry in translation from Latin America, read by the translators at Sicardi Gallery. This reading will showcase work from recent and forthcoming books by Gastón Fernández (Peru) translated by KM Cascia, Ennio Moltedo (Chile) translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz, Luis Chaves (Costa Rica) translated by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim, and María Paz Guerrero­ (Colombia) translated by Camilo Roldán.

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KM CASCIA is the translator of Mexican modernist Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems (World Poetry, 2023). Born in Michigan City, Indiana, Cascia left school at the age of 17 and picked up Spanish working in restaurant kitchens in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Calque and Asymptote, they have published four collections of their own poems and their translations of Latin American poetry have appeared in numerous magazines, including Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous.

MARGUERITE FEITLOWITZ won an NEA Translation Fellowship for Night. She’s also translated Liliane Atlan, Griselda Gambaro, Salvador Novo, and Luisa Valenzuela. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. Her honors include two Fulbrights, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. Her writing on literature, art, and human rights has appeared internationally. She teaches at Bennington College, where she founded and directs the program in literary and humanitarian translation.

JULIA GUEZ is a writer and translator based in Houston. She co-translated Equestrian Monuments by the Costa Rican poet, Luis Chaves, for After Hours Editions in 2022. She is currently translating La Mano Suicida by Maria Montero. Guez is also preparing a portfolio of poems to celebrate Rolando Cardenas (whose work will be featured in the next installment of the UNSUNG MASTERS SERIES). Poems, essays and translations have appeared or will soon be forthcoming from IMAGE, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, POETRY, The Guardian and PEN Poetry Series. For her work, Guez has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Inprint - Restrepo Americas Translation Prize. She is the translation editor for Gulf Coast.

CAMILO ROLDÁN is a bilingual Colombian-American poet and translator born in Milwaukee, WI and currently living in Bogotá, Colombia. He is the author of the poetry collections Dropout (Ornithopter Press, 2019) and El último soneto y nos vamos (HAO Rotativo de Letras, 2022). His translations include the chapbook Amilkar U., Nadaísta in Translation (These Signals Press, 2011), and María Paz Guerrero’s book God is a Bitch Too (Dios también es una perra) (UDP, 2020). Individual poems and translations have appeared in various print and digital magazines in the US and abroad.