Hispanic Heritage Month Series 2011 Presents:

Tendencies in Recent Mexican Poetry. Discussion and reading presented by Mexican poet Juan Manuel Portillo.

When: September 22, 2011
Time: 8:30 p.m.- 9:45 p.m. EST
Where: Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum Distance Learning Center- West Sim
Program Note: Discussion will focus on the position of the contemporary reader as a critic/historian/theoretician in regards to poetry. Bilingual (Spanish/English)presentation.


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Juan Manuel Portillo is a Mexican poet, educator, scholar and translator born in Ciudad Juárez in 1967. He was a full time professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (1999-2004), where he taught a variety of courses related to poetry and poetics, including Mexican Modern Poetry, and seminars on Octavio Paz and Latin American Contemporary Poetry. Portillo is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). He has taught courses in Hispanic Culture and Literature, Spanish for Heritage Speakers, and Chicano Culture at UC Davis. His poems and translations have been published in a variety of literary and cultural journals in México and the U.S., including Anuario de poesía mexicana 2004, edited by Luis Felipe Fabre and Tedy López Mills, and published by Fondo de Cultura Económica. His translations include poetry by John Taggart, Paul Celan and Goeffrey Hill. His scholarly papers in modern and contemporary Mexican poets, such as Coral Bracho, Octavio Paz, Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, Jorge Esquina, Dolores Dorantes and Felipe Fabre, and Uruguayan poet and critic Eduardo Milán, and poet and translator Jen Hofer, have been presented in over twenty conferences throughout the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Portillo is co-editor of the broadside series Hoja Frugal. In collaboration with musicologist Ana Alonso Minutti, Portillo edited volume 6 of Brujula, Interdisciplinary Review on Latin American Studies, published by the Hemispheric Institute of the Americas of UC Davis. Also with Alonso Minutti, he has an ongoing interdisciplinary project that focuses on the intersection between music and poetry. His awards and fellowships include a 1994 David Alfaro Siqueiros Fellowship in poetry, and the 2009-2010 UC Davis Research Fellowship for the Humanities. His poetry collection, passwords_ , is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press in 2011.

Portillo’s poetry can be found in the following journals:

Tierra Adentro
Oráculo
El Poeta y su a Aufgabe,
Paso del Río Grande del Norte
Solar

For more information, email: lvmfestival@ymail.com