“Chinatown a toda hora y otros poemas” by Andrea Cote

Andrea Cote-Botero is a much garlanded poet and prose writer, having won The National Poetry Prize from the Universidad Externado de Colombia (2003), the Puentes de Struga International Poetry Prize (2005) and the Cittá de Castrovillari Prize (2010). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. Cote-Botero grew up in a Colombia that was…

“I don’t give refunds.” Eye-popping interviews with writers: PEN America Journal 2017

  Being black in America … Walter Mosley: “It’s hard to feel nostalgic, being black in America. It’s not that you don’t like it, or remember it, it’s just hard to feel nostalgic for it. “I miss those times when they used to lynch us,” and “Those cotton fields were so much fun. I liked…

RIP Irina Ratushinskaya 1954-2017

Irina Ratushinskaya, the Soviet dissident poet and novelist, was a legendarily defiant figure. Sentenced in 1983, on her 29th birthday, to seven years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” she not only survived, but wrote poems on bars of soap with the burnt ends of matchsticks. She memorized and erased them before…

Teju Cole’s “Open City” – a new prophet stirs

I’m coming late to the work of Teju Cole. He’s one of the leaders of The Black Renaissance – a group of young-and-gifteds that includes Yaa Gyasi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Terrance Hayes, Julie Iromuanya, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chigozi Obioma, and Tracy K. Smith. Cole’s luminous novel Open City was published in 2012. In terms of traditional…

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” – Happy 50th Birthday

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel was published 50 years ago. It’s widely recognized as the masterpiece of 20th century Latin American literature – some would say all of 20th century literature. It’s the book that ushered in the Latino Boom, the ascension of Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar to the world stage….