Roberto Bolaño garnered international attention for his novels and stories, and his influence on the world of fiction has been substantial and much discussed. But he was also, and formatively, a poet, and his work often deals with the lives of poets, including the infrarealist circle of his youth that included Bolaño’s close friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro.  What does Bolaño’s work as both novelist and poet mean and discover for contemporary poetry?  This event will bring together experts and translators of Bolaño and others.  We will begin with readings, including presentations of some of the participants’ own translations of Bolaño and Santiago, and move on to a panel discussion about the possibilities and implications of encounters with Bolaño’s poetic universe.  Participants include Cole Heinowitz, Carmen Boullosa, Brandon Holmquest, and others TBA.

Cole Heinowitz is the author of three books of poetry, Daily Chimera (Incommunicado), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour), and The Rubicon (The Rest), as well as the critical study, Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh University Press). She is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College. Carmen Boullosa (Mexico City, 1954) has published fifteen novels, the most recents La virgen y el violin, El complot de los románticos and Las paredes hablan at Editorial Siruela in Madrid, a  (in English translation: They´re Cows, We’re Pigs, Leaving Tabasco and Cleopatra Dismounts, at Grove Press), as well as books of poems (in English translations, Jump of the Manta Ray, by Psiche Hugues, illustrations by Philip Hugues, The Old Press). She received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in Mexico, in Germany the Anna Seghers and the Liberaturpreis, and the Café Gijón’s of Madrid. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow, held the Chair Andrés Bello at NYU, and the Alfonso Reyes Chair at La Sorbonne, and now is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores, in Mexico. She´s host of the CUNY-T.V. show Nueva York, for which she´s been awarded four New York EMMYs. Brandon Holmquest translated Manuel Maples Arce and Julia Ferrer and Gaston Fernandez, among others, and used to be an editor at Calque and Asymptote.