New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading in Spanish and English with renowned poet Fernando Valverde on Friday, Feb. 28, from 7-8 p.m.
UVA professor Samuel Amago will be reading Valverde’s poems in translation.
Valverde’s new collection of poetry, The Insistence of Harm, was recently released in translation by the University Press of Florida.
This event is free to attend and open to the public.
The Insistence of Harm is a series of poignant lyric poems that takes readers from India to the Balkans to Spain and to Latin America, exploring the nature of “harm” in its various guises—war, disease, heartbreak, suicide. The poems grapple with both the reality of loss and the distance that language imposes on it.
The English translations by Allen Josephs and Laura Juliet Wood effectively capture both tone and content while attending to subtle nuances of the original Spanish, bringing a new and important voice to students of Spanish and poetry readers alike.
Valverde (Granada, Spain 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM, and the Sorbonne).
His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most significant awards for poetry in Spanish, among them the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias, and the Antonio Machado.
His last book, The Insistence of Harm, has been the most-sold book of poetry in Spain for months and has received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute of the City University of New York. He was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014 for his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco.
For 10 years he has worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País. He has been, for more than a decade, the director of the International Festival of Poetry in Granada, one of the most important literary events in Europe, that has received more than 300 authors, including several Nobel Prize laureates. He has taught poetry at the University of North Georgia, and at Emory University, in Atlanta, and he is now teaching poetry and literature in Spanish at the University of Virginia.
Amago is an authority on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish narrative and film, and also has a strong interest in cultural studies. He is the author of two monographs, True Lies: Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Bucknell UP, 2006) and Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film (Routledge 2013), and is currently working on a third, provisionally entitled Basura: A Cultural Archaeology of Contemporary Spain.
He is also the coeditor of two volumes, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, with Carlos Jerez-Farrán (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and a special issue of Hispanófila, called Vademécum del cine iberoamericano: Métodos y teorías, with Eugenia Afinoguénova and Kathryn Everly (2016). A third collaboration will appear shortly, Drawing Nearer: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain, with Matthew J. Marr.
Professor Amago received his PhD in Spanish literature from the University of Virginia in 2003, and has previously taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the Chair of the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department at the University of Virginia.
About New Dominion Bookshop
Serving Albemarle and Central Virginia since 1924, New Dominion Bookshop is the oldest independent bookseller in Virginia. Located in Historic Downtown Charlottesville, New Dominion is a general trade bookshop that serves as the hub for readings and other literary events in the community. For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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Chris Graham
