Puerto Rico en mi corazón: a #PoetsForPuertoRico event, is a reading of Puerto Rican poets from the island and in the diaspora in support of the publication of Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, a collection of letterpress broadsides of 20 Puerto Rican poets writing in English and Spanish.
The event is supported by CantoMundo, a national organization that cultivates a community of Latinx poets through workshops, symposia, and public readings, #POETSFORPUERTORICO, a series of benefit readings supporting the grassroots recovery movement in Puerto Rico, and the Poetry Coalition, a national poetry coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.
Printed in both languages, Puerto Rico en mi corazón features work by both emerging and established poets living on the island and in the diaspora: afro-boricuas, mixed and white-boricuas, indigenx as well as poets of all genders.
The poems, some of which predate the storm, others which were written in response, look beyond the headlines to undertake reparative work across languages and oceans.
The event will feature live readings by Ana Portnoy Brimmer, Joey De Jesus, Yara Liceaga, Cindy Jiménez-Vera, Kenyatta JP Garcia, and Vincent Toro, youth poets Gabrielle Beatrice Roldan, Khalin Vasquez and Nick Cruz, an appearance by activist Iris Morales, and recorded performances by poets on the island.
Puerto Rico en mi corazón broadsides will be available for purchase. Sales go to support Taller Salud, a non-profit organization that provides health services to low income communities of color, women, and LGBTQ Puerto Ricans on the island. For more information on these efforts please visit puertoricoenmicorazon.org/.
PERFORMERS
Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a poet/performer, creative nonfiction writer and ARTivist. She is the recipient of the Sandra Cisneros Fellowship. The daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, she was born in New York, but was raised, and currently lives, in Puerto Rico.
Joey De Jesus is a queer Nuyorican poet. Joey edits poetry for Apogee Journal and edited Façadomy, has a BA from Oberlin College, a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a 2017-8 Departmental Fellow in NYU’s MA in Performance Studies. Joey is a recipient of the 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry and lives in Queens.
Cindy Jiménez-Vera was born in Puerto Rico. She is the author of No lugar, Islandia, and 400 nuevos soles, among others. Her work has been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese.
Yara Liceaga is the coordinator and curator of Poetry Is Busy, a multi-disciplinary, multi-media reading series. Her column, Buscapié, appears in El Nuevo Día. She is the author of cielo riel/cross sections and cruda realidad, among others.
Kenning (FKA Kenyatta) JP García is a Nuyorican chronicler, humorist, poet and editor originally from Brooklyn, NY. JP resides in Albany where xe studied linguistics and spent a dozen years as a cook.
Vincent Toro is the author of Stereo.Island.Mosaic, which was awarded the Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Ahsahta Press and the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America. He earned an MFA in poetry from Rutgers and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. Toro is the recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. His poems have been published in the Buenos Aires Review, Codex, Rattle, Cortland Review, Vinyl, Hawai’I Review, Washington Square Review, Paterson Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. Toro teaches at Bronx Community College and is a writing liaison at The Cooper Union Saturday Program, as well as a poet in the schools for the Dreamyard Project and the Dodge Poetry Foundation.
Gabrielle Beatrice Roldan is of Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican decent. She grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey where art is everywhere and was privileged enough to be able to be surrounded by other artists of color.
Khalin Vasquez is a Boricua poet born who was raised in Brooklyn. She has performed at the Library of Congress, the Apollo Theatre, Nuyorican Poets Café and Lincoln Center. A member of the 2016 Urban Word Youth Slam team, Khalin is currently a 2017 Youth Poet Ambassador for New York
Nick Cruz is a Jersey-based cultural worker of Colombian and Puerto Rican descent and is currently a senior at Rutgers - New Brunswick, where they first got into writing and performing poetry through attending Verbal Mayhem Poetry Collective.
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The event is also part of the Poetry Coalition’s March 2018 theme of "Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" #MyDreamingMyLoving #PoetryCoalition.
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For more information about the organizations and progamming visit: