F161.
The Colonel: Thirty Years Later
Friday, March 25, 2022
10:35 am to 11:35 am
First published in 1978, Carolyn Forché’s poem “The Colonel," set in El Salvador as the country spiraled toward civil war, has been widely read, critiqued, emulated, and anthologized. Thirty years after the signing of the peace accords that ended the war and the poem's publication, five Salvadoran poets born in El Salvador and in the US—of different generations and affinities with the poem—discuss the impact of “The Colonel” on contemporary writing and on a generation of Central American poets.
Participants
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow (2019), Washington State poet laureate (2018–2021), and Seattle's first civic poet (2015–2017) She is the author of This City, Killing Marías, One River, A Thousand Voices, and Cipota under the Moon (forthcoming April 2022).
Yvette Siegert is a poet, editor, and Ledbury Critic. Her writing has received support from CantoMundo, Macondo, PEN, the NEA, and Bread Loaf, and her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik won the Best Translated Book Award. She is a PhD candidate in Latin American studies at the University of Oxford.
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar’s most recent chapbook is Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone’s Eyes. She is a scholar, teacher, and graduate student worker at Yale University, a CantoMundo fellow, and member of US Central American collective Tierra Narrative.
William Archila, author of The Art of Exile, winner of the 2010 International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, winner of the 2013 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, has been published in American Poetry Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, POETRY Magazine, and Tin House.
