Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Kevin A. González at Cave Canem


I was on the phone yesterday with Cornelius Eady. He was in Pittsburgh at the Cave Canem workshop and he called to confirm that 60 copies of The Night Tito Trinidad KO'ed Ricardo Mayorga had arrived and had been passed out to all the fellows. I had chosen this Momotombo Press title specifically.

One of the conversations Cornelius and I have been having these past few years, since he became a colleague at Notre Dame, is how to enhance relations and communication between our respective poetry communities. On the surface, it sounds, and still sounds, a bit too abstract. Some initiatives between Letras Latinas and Cave Canem have resulted (with the brokering of the Guild Complex) and I'll talk about those in a bit. There's also been a fruitful dialogue with Alison Meyers, the Executive Director of CC, and we are developing one idea that we intend to carry out in the District.

But it occured to me a few weeks ago that one next gesture would simply be to give away Kevin González's chapbook to the 50+ fellows while they were on their retreat; that having Terrance Hayes introduce them all to Kevin's work in his generous introduction would be a good thing---perhaps even lead some readers of the chapbook to seek out Cultural Studies (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009).

Dialogue, bridge-building, getting better acquainted: one reader at a time.

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