Raúl Zurita is one of Latin America’s most celebrated and controversial poets. After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 US-supported military coup that ousted Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, Zurita’s poetry sought to register the violence and atrocities committed against the Chilean people and the corruption of the Spanish language. During the dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990, Zurita published a trilogy of books (Purgatory, Anteparadise, and The New Life), wrote poems in the sky above New York City, bulldozed poems in the Chilean desert, and helped to form the art collective “Colectivo de Accion de Arte” that used performance as an act of political resistance.
Zurita was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature, a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and he has held poetry readings at numerous American universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley. His books in English translation include Anteparadise, Purgatory, INRI, and Song for His Disappeared Love. He lives in Chile.
Zurita will be reading from his latest poetry collection, For Song for His Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky, directly after this event.
Sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Cosponsored by the College of Arts and Letters, the Creative Writing Program, the Department of English, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Global Modernisms Initiative, the Henkels Lecture Series, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Letras Latinas, and the Institute for Latino Studies