Please join the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Department of English, and the Robert P. Hubbard Professorship on May 2 at 7 p.m. in Oden Auditorium to celebrate the poetry of Professor of Spanish Víctor Rodríguez Núñez as he retires from teaching.
Rodríguez Núñez will be reading from his latest book in English translation, "midnight minutes" [actas de medianoche] (Action Books, 2024). Widely regarded as a seminal work that signals a new path for contemporary Latin American poetry, "midnight minutes" is a groundbreaking, experimental long poem written from a tiny balcony in Austin, Texas, as Rodríguez Núñez finished his doctoral work and a McIlvaine Apartment in Gambier, during his first year as a Kenyon professor. His translator, Professor of Spanish Katherine M. Hedeen, will join him for the reading.
Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is a poet, journalist, essayist, translator and professor. He is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over ninety collections of poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize and most recently the Manuel Alcántara Prize. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese, and he has read his poetry in more than fifty countries. In the eighties he was the editor of the influential Cuban cultural journal El Caimán Barbudo where he published numerous articles on poetry and film. He has brought out a book of interviews with some of the most renowned poets in the Spanish language and has compiled three anthologies of poetry from his generation in Cuba. He has translated both from English into Spanish (Mark Strand, C.D. Wright, John Kinsella) and from Spanish into English (Juan Gelman, Antonio Gamoneda, José Emilio Pacheco). He divides his time between Gambier and Havana, Cuba.
Books will be available for purchase. This event will be livestreamed.