We’re thrilled to announce our very own Orlando Menes, Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame and Associate Professor, will be reading from his most recent collection of poems, Fetish, at the University of Notre Dame on Wednesday, November 6th, 2013, at the Hammes Campus Bookstore. The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m.
Fetish delves into the hybrid sacred, diaspora and exile, and the relationship between the cross-cultural imaginations. The poems sew together memories of darkness and light, pleasures and perils and stories of dislocation and loss, following a world patched together by a family over five generations from Miami to Cuba, Panama to Bolivia and Peru. The scents of exile and emigration provide refuge throughout, resulting in an intensely woven tapestry of Menes’ Americas.
Menes is the author of three books of poems, Rumba atop the Stones (Peepal Tree, 2001), Furia (Milkweed, 2005), and Fetish which won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2013. His writing has been published in several prominent anthologies and literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. Menes has published several translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009). He also earned a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Prior to the reading, Letras Latinas, the literary program within Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, is hosting a reception at 6:00 p.m. in the East Lounge on the second floor of McKenna Hall. The reception and reading are free and open to the public.
See You There,
Dev ’15