Multiple Legacies: Julia de Burgos and Puerto Rican Writers and Artists in New York
Common Reading Program: "Multiple Legacies: Julia de Burgos and Puerto Rican Writers and Artists in New York"
Queensborough Community College
Date: March 09 2017 - 12:00 PM
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As part of the Common Reading Program at Queensborough Community College, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario will speak on her book Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014). Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Perez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Join us as Perez-Rosario discusses her book, Becoming Julia de Burgos, which departs from the prevailing emphasis on the poet and intellectual as a nationalist writer to focus on her contributions to New York Puerto Rican literary and visual culture. It moves beyond the standard tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to place her within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture to consider more carefully the complex history of the island and the diaspora. Guest speaker: Vanessa Perez Rosario, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also Managing Editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.