Bio-bibliographical Information
About Poets Comming to the
XVI International Poetry Festival of Medellín

• Poets from Africa
• Poets from America
• Poets from Asia
• Poets from Europe
• Poets from Oceania

Poets from Africa

David Rubadiri was born in Liuli, Malawi, on July 19, 1930. Poet, novelist, playwright, university professor and diplomat, permanent ambassador of his country to the United Nations. He made studies in Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda, between 1952 and 1956 and later he studied Literature at King’s Collage, Cambridge. He received a Diploma in Education from Bristol University, England. He has been teacher at the University of Botswana and dean of the Language and Social Sciences Education Department at the same university.Member of the Executive Committee of the National Theater of Kenia, between 1975 and 1980. Publications: Growing Up With Poetry: An Anthology for Secondary Schools, 1989; Poems from East Africa, 1971; No Bride Price (novel, 1967) in which he shows his disillusion with the post-independent style of Kamuzu Banda, that guided Malawi toward its independence from the British Empire, but whose actions as president were very controversial because of his relations with the pro-white movement of South Africa. He also wrote the play, Come to Tea, in 1965.His work has appeared in international publications such as Transition, Black Orpheus, Présence Africaine, as well as in the first anthology Modern Poetry of Africa, in 1963. Currently he is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malawi. His poems show a fruitful conscient combination of African influences and European poetical forms. Although there is a certain melancholy in his poems, which is a common characteristic of black poets from Africa and other regions of the world, it is maybe the black humor that better describes the poetry of Rubadiri. In his creations, that melancholy is accompanied with irony and sarcasm that painfully touch the vital experience of his race. However, this classic of African poetry, from whom we will not forget his quality as a very recognized poet in the world, he gathers some elements that make his poetry one of the richest of contemporary Africa. Always particular, when he approaches the issue of love he makes it differently, without romanticism but with the sufficient evocative force for drawing us near to the riverside of his love. 

Lenrie Peters was born in Bathurst (at the time a British colony), now Banjul, Gambia on September 1, 1932. Poet, narrator, publisher, medical surgeon and opera singer. Author of the poetry books: Katchikali; Satellites; and Collected Poems and the novel The Second Round, 1965. All his works were published by Heinemann, in London, in the collection African writers series. After making his first studies in Bathurst and in Sierra Leone, he traveled to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences at Trinity College. In England, he was the president of the Union of African Students. He also worked as a publisher for one of the earliest Gambian newspapers, The Gambia Echo. As well as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and other writers, he belongs to the first generation of the Anglophone West African Writers in being recognized as such and being published abroad. He is an enthusiast defender of the panafricanism. A cosmopolitan poet, his densely packed, minimalist stanzaic structures fit in the broad universal spectrum of human experience: aging and death, the risks of love, the loneliness of exile. In his book Satellites (1967), the poet-doctor's detachment is a metaphor for the uprooted individual's painful existential isolation; his scalpel penetrating “at the cutting chaotic edge of things” an image for the imaginative piercing and spiritual penetration which are the real goals of the poet's quest. Although he gets furious with the frustration of the African underdevelopment, he reflects about blind and sickening models of “progress” that do not show a continuity with the past and destroy more than what they preserve. In his only novel The Second Round, a physicist trained in Great Britain and victim of the so called “massacre of the soul” brought by westernization, returns to the capital of his homeland filled up with “noble ideas about the progress of Africa”, but ends accepting a job in a remote jungle hospital and therefore taking roots in the traditional experience

Sayed Hegab was born in Egypt in 1936. He does not represent only a great name in the world of songs, but he also represents a wave of love and truthfulness directed to his country and people. He is the poet of the poor who feels their sufferings and dreams as well. He always says "If I were one of the tales princes, I would give every poor a house with a garden full of flowers and a nest full of chicks. I would also hang a bright moon and many bits of stars. He is one of the few writers who write good drama. he analyzes dramatic works through penetrating into their cores and subjects his linguistic tools to suit this work.

Amadou Lamine Sall was born in Kaolack, Senegal, on March 26, 1951. Founder and current president of the African House for International Poetry. President of the Association of Writers of Senegal, President of the Poetry Biennal of Dakar and member of the World Academy of Poetry, with headquarters in Verona, Italy. Founder of Editions Feu de Brousse. He obtained the Great Award of The French Academy. His poetic anthologies have been translated into English, Spanish, Polish, German, Macedonian, Serbi-Croatian and Greek. He has been invited to participate as a lecturer in many universities from Africa, Asia, Europe and America. One of the most recognised poets of Africa; he outstands for his haughty and accusative attitude. His published poetry books are: Mante des auroras (1979); Comme un iceberg en flames (1982) awarded with the Second International Poetry Prize Claude Sernet Rodez; Locataire du néant (1989); Kamandalu (1990); J'ai mangé tout le pays de la nuit (1994); Le Prophète ou le cœur aux mains de pain (1997); Odes nues (1998); Les veines sauvages (2001); and Noces célestes pour Léopold Sédar Senghor (2004). He also published the Anthology of poets from Senegal, prefaced by Lopold Sédar Senghor; New Anthology of black and Malgache poetry in French, with Charles Carrere, and Poems of Africa for children, prefaced also by Senghor. His poems have an elegiac tone that keeps up through all the poetical construction. Even his poetry of love (sometimes decidedly erotic) serves as well to heave up the banner of his culture and his race. He is the voice of the one that reveals disgrace, as it is the case in African poets in general. There is no complaint but denunciation in his poems, whose graceful structure is full of music and color, of figures and images that seduce the reader, striking and outstanding amidst the total landscape of the poems.

Adamou Ide was born in Niamey, Niger on November 22, 1951. Poet and novelist, president of the Societé des Gens du Lettres du Níger, Society of writers and men of culture. He received the National Poetry Prize in 1981. He has published the books of poetry: Unfinished Cry (1984) and On the Land of Silence (1994); and collectively Ay Ne Han (2004). His published prose is: Straw Camisole, 1987; Talibo, A Child of the District, 1996 and Wa Sappé Ay Se! (Vote for Me!), 2003; He he will soon publish Mother’s Song for a Sick Son, poetry and Cockroach Man; short stories. This is what he says about his beginning in poetry: “…From my very inside, an acute feeling of injustice and bitter revolt emerged” I think I have not tried to understand… and I have cried: it was the voice of poetry! It became a weapon and a tribune for protest and denunciation. I claim for liberty, solidarity, brotherhood among men and I think that in every man there is a poet: But I also feel that poets are feared by those in power that use violence, who are prosperous at the expense of the collective suffering. When they are denounced, some poets are imprisoned, tortured, killed or exiled as if this was enough to kill the power of the word in them. The poets continue paying a harsh tribute for their liberty of thought. Again, poetry appears as the last bastion for the struggle for liberty! In these times, some powerful men of this world believe they are able to enslave others by means of unilateral thought, unfair economical laws, unjust wars and they want poets to speak in one way or another. Now, more than ever, we need poetry and poets committed to the struggle for peace, justice and tolerance! Lullaby poetry is intended for making children sleep, meanwhile bombs fall and destroy their legs: I have never believed in this kind of “colorless” and “odorless” poetry. I believe in words that name suffering and that wake up hope in open furrows by misery and tears. The poetic writing has allowed me to live an incredible adventure. An always-new adventure in a mysterious world of words. In the poem one feels that the agitated life of the words is being written, that they heap together to find a place in the verse, they hug each other to create rhythm, to provoke or stimulate the reader’s senses, and one never knows when the poem is finished or if it’s the poet that being tired has put down the weapons. But what is the matter if the poem is there and sings before you the real love and liberty!...

Ahmad al-Shahawi was born in Damietta, Egypt, on November 12, 1960. He studied Journalism and graduated in 1982. As a student, he participated in the foundation of the newspaper Sawt Sohag where he directed the cultural section. In 1985, he started working in the newspaper al-Ahram. He participated in the foundation of the magazine Nisf al-dunia from the same newspaper. He also got involved in many activities in relation to his work that took place in the United States. In 1985, he obtained the prize UNESCO for letters and in 1998 the prize Kavafis for poetry. He is a member of the Comission of Poetry of the High Counsil of Culture of Egypt since 2001. He has published ten poetry books among them: Two Rakaas for love, The Proverbs, The book of love, Topics of the one in love, The Book of Death, Water in fingers. His poetic work denotes a deep knowledge of the Sufi Muslim heritage, from the Arab Maghreb to the Persian one passing through Egypt. His poems fascinate for his innovation as well as for his modernity. Inspired in the Sufi poetic tradition, El-Shahavi takes up again the topics of his ancestors: the passion, the trascendency of human emotions, the captivating omniprescence of the Female Being. He gets inspired as usual in his present experience as an engaged poet, in a world consecrated to inhibition and to the denigration of pleasure due to the Other, the chosen being, subject and object unique and perfect of the loving state. He enjoys dismissing from the woman the sacrificed sensations due to this quasi-congenital shame that limits the legitimate flow of pleasure of the body. He digs the tongue to extirpate the “hidden”. The spiritual message underlying in each one of El Shahawi´s works places his words in this refined level whose millennial strokes of the lovely feeling get to captivate the reader in modern times.

Toyin Adewale was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1969. Poet and narrator. She made studies in Literature and English. She has also worked as literary critic in different newspapers of her country, among them The Guardian, Post Express and The Daily Times. She was cofounder and coordinator for several years of the Association of Writers of Nigeria. Works: Naked Testimonies 1995; Breaking The Silence, 1996; Inkwells, 1997; Die Aromaforscherin, 1998; Flackernde Kerzen, 1999; 25 New Nigerian Poets, 2000; Aci Cikolata, Gunizi Yayincilik, 2003; and Nigerian Women Short Stories, 2005. Above any consideration of gender, the poetry of Toyin Adewale outstands in the contemporary world as one of the most beautiful and outstanding voices of the new African poetry. Her work is a kind of cultural mixture where the common issues of African poetry appear: the savannah the faunae, the beautiful landscapes and its surroundings, the geography of pain -Goree-, etc., and along with these elements there are others that belong to universal poetry, from other latitudes and cultures and that give as a result a unique mixture of great beauty and that have a strength which seduce us and integrate us in its poetic heartbeating. In her poems we find elements that upsurge as wild grass and that bet for a manifestation that goes beyond what is simply poetical and lyrical finding in this way images of bitter flavor, ironical and painful, itinerary of pain. Intimate poetry with elegiac aspects, her work clearly stands as one that will create a lot of expectancy and that must be included in any anthology of African poetry.

Marcel Kemadjou was born in Douala, Cameroon on December 6, 1970. After his unfinished studies of law, he dedicated himself to the resale of harberdashery. He had always considered writing as a lost of time despite her sister’s invitations who found in him a certain talent. Motivated by her, he participated in a contest and won the prize of the young Central African poetry in 1994. After this he started publishing, Cries of the Soul, a selection of poems published in 1997 and followed by The Blue Beggar (short novel) in 2000. In 2003 he published Poto-poto blues (poems) and in 2005, The Room of Crayon, a collection of texts. He lives in Douala and there he leads Open Book, an association for the promotion of the book and the reading. What draws the attention in his poetry is the stretch union with music that favors a kind of writing abundant in images, simple, dense, lively and happy. Generally, it’s a committed poetry that develops issues referred to the pauperization of his country, to liberty and going through segregationism of the new western laws about immigration, the political hypocrisy, all this seen from the street’s side point of view. He then ues word playing, the language of the streets and sometimes what in his country is called the camfranglish that is a mixture of Cameroonese, English and French. His poems reflect a vast culture always trying not to fall in the specialized language of erudition. For him, poetry must use a language as universal as that of music so that the message it brings can be captured spontaneously by the one who hears or reads it. Consequently, numerous repetitions are noticed and they have the enchanting value of proverbs.

Poets from America 

Rodolfo Alonso was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1934. He was the youngest member of the avant-garde group Poesía Buenos Aires. He translated numerous authors from several languages, among them Fernando Pessoa from whom he was the first translator in Latin America. He directed his own publishing house, Anthologies from his poetic work were published in Belgium, Spain, Mexico and c anada. Poet, essayist and translator. Since he wrote Salud o nada in 1954, he published more than 25 books of his own, these were mostly poetry books but he also published essays, reflections and narrative. In 1997 he received The National Poetry Prize for his book Música concreta, 1994.. According to Jose Augusto Reabra: Devoted fully, although “insecurely” to love for the words, Rodolfo Alonso has the lucidity of the poet that wanting to “talk clear” (Talk clear is other symptomatic title of a poetry collection from his). He always feels the “lack” and at the same time the infinite potentiality of the meanings of language. He wrote: One time I found myself saying that words are approximate” clearly stating the double significance of the expression, never could they mean everything, imprecise as they are, however they serve to approximate men” In the present year he obtained The International Poetry prize in Spanish language summoned by the Magazine Prometeo.

Quincy Troupe was born in New York , United States , in 1943. Poet, narrator, essayist, college professor. He has published, among other works, the poetry books: Embryo, 1971; Skulls along the River, 1984; Weather Reports: New and Selected Poems, 1991; Avalanche, 1997; Trascircularities; New and Selected Poems, 2002; and more recently, The Architechture of Language. He is Emeritus Professor of creative writing and American and Caribbean Literature at the University of California . He currently publishes Black Renaissance Noire, an academic, cultural, political and literary newspaper published by the program of African studies and the Institute of Afroamerican Issues of the University of New York. His poetry and prose have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Polish and Dutch. He has read his work throughout all the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Canada , The Caribbean, Mexico and Brazil . He has been professor in different universities of Africa and North America . He was co-author along with Miles Davis of the editorial success Miles: The Autobiography, 1989. He has published the following books for children: Take it to the hoop, Magic Johnson, based on his popular “Poem for Magic” 2000; Little Stevie 2005 and Hallalujah about old Ray Charles, 2006.

Alvaro Miranda was born in Santa Marta, Colombia, in 1945. His first poetry book Indiada appears in 1971. In 1982, when he received The National Poetry Prize, The University of Antioquia published Los Esceritos de Don Sancho Jimeno. His novel, La risa del cuervo, written in 1993, obtained the first prize in Buenos Aires and was published the next year by The University of Belgrano. Re-written during several years and published again in Bogotá. (Thomas de Quincey publishers, 1992), it is awarded by Colcultura, with the Pedro Gómez Valderrama Award. Simulación de un reino compiles the poetic work of Alvaro Miranda, written between 1965 and 1995, poems that were scattered in newspapers, magazines and collective books. (Tropicomaquia, Indiada, cuatro de Lebrija, Los Escritos de Sancho de Jimeno, and his most recent work, Simulación de un Reino).

Nestor Francia was born in Caracas on November 11, 1947. Poet, essayist and narrator. He graduated in Literature from The Universidad Central of Venezuela. He has published several books on political essays and social investigation. He conducts a TV and a Radio program, both of them flavored with a political humor. He was one of the leaders of The Movement of University Renovation in the sixties. He is a press columnist and currently he is consultant of the state owned petroleum company PDVSA in the area of communications. Among his books of essays are: El nido del Simurgh, 1999; and Qué piensa Chávez, 2003. Other books: Crónicas malvadas, novel, 1990 and Puente Llaguno: Las víctimas hablan essay and interviews, 2002.

Gioconda Belli was born in Managua, Nicaragua on December 9, 1948. She participated since 1970 in the fight against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, as a member of the Sandinista Front. She lived in exile in Mexico and Costa Rica. She worked as member of the government in The Sandinista Revolution in the eighties. Her first book, Sobre La Grama, 1972, won the poetry prize of The National University of Nicaragua. In 1978 she obtained the Casa de Las Americas Award, Cuba for her book Línea de Fuego. Between 1982 and 1987, she published three poetry books: Truenos y Arco Iris; Amor Insurrecto and De la Costilla de Eva. In 1988, she published her first novel La Mujer Habitada that obtained the Award of The Foundation of Book Sellers, Librarians and Publishers of Germany and The Anna Seghers Award from The Academy of Arts of Germany in 1989. In 1990 she published her second novel, Sofía de Los Presagios and later the short story for children. El Taller de Las Mariposas, with which she was granted the Award Luchas from the weekly publication Die ZEIT. In 1996, she published the novel Waslala and in 1998 another poetry book: Apogeo. In 2001, the book El país bajo mi piel was published, a memory of her years in The Sandinismo and in 2002 she obtained The International Poetry Prize Generación del 27 for her poetry book, Mi íntima multitud. El Pergamino de la Seducción, 2005 is her fourth novel. After being published in Spain by the publishing house Seix Barral in April 2005, it was published in Germany, The Netherlands and The United States. In August 2003 in the speech of acceptance before The Royal Academy of Language she said, remembering her beginning in writing: “Young woman I was, subject of love and the lunar magnetism that the sea’s fluxes and refluxes produce, I found in the words the perfect accomplices for expressing the euphoria and the disconcert of living. The Word turned into flesh to me. My flesh. And from my feminine being I talked about fumaroles that lightened my epidermis, about the crevices, the caves and the cliffs of my geography. Recently initiated in the knowledge of ancient powers, I celebrated my woman’s sex, my constitution of earth capable of opening in craters or giving birth to mountains. What is eroticism, into which I’m been classified and characterized, but the fleshliness of the word that pokes into life its origin and transmutes the privacy of the lovers into a space of encounter with the others and into a mirror where creation looks at itself?”.

Macario Matus was born in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, México on January 2, 1943. Poet, narrator, essayist, translator and journalist. He collaborates in the newspapers Excélsior and Unomásuno. Author of the poetry book Los zapotecas (binni záa), recently published by the collection Contemporary Indigenous Letters from The General Direction of Popular Cultures of CONACULTA, in his verses he highlights the existent relation between man and nature as well as the vision towards the cosmos characteristic of the pre-hispanic people and the great cultures that have upsurged in the history of the world, in Spanish and Zapoteco. Particularly he expresses “the genesis, struggle, life and death that contain the first ages of the existence root. In the time we are living -we the zapoteca people- we still believe that we come from the roots of the trees and the earth’s entrails. It`s an ancient, magical and fantastic thought that at the moment of being expressed in literature can question what is happening. We couldn’t make ourselves to get known in this way. Now we know how to read and write, many of us are writers and poets in a natural manner, we possess these instruments, the opportunity is there now.

Ricardo Cuéllar Valencia was born in Calarcá, Quindio, Colombia on September 10, 1946. Poet, essayist, publisher and college professor. Sociologist from The Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana of Medellín, Colombia, he made his doctorate in The University of Valladolid, Spain. During 35 years, he has worked as college professor in different universities from Mexico, Spain and Colombia. His academic experience consists in directing professorships in subjects such as Social Science, Poetics, Literary Criticism, Literary investigation methodology and History of Hispanic-American Literature. He has worked as cultural journalist, publisher of magazines, supplements and columnist in different newspapers from Colombia and Mexico. He has published the poetry books: Fatiga de los cereales, Sereno secreto de morir; Pasos del sueño y el insomnio; De los Mitos de Coyatoc; Rosa del destino; Los cielos de mi cuerpo and Ojos dorados del cuerpo. Among some of his published essay books we have: Simón Bolívar y las guerras de independencia en la Nueva Granada; Escritores chiapanecos del siglo XVll; and Fray Matías de Córdoba o el pensamiento criollo en el siglo XVll en Guatemala. He has been the Director of The Department of Literature of The Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, México, where he published the Poetry Collection Poesía no eres tú. He also directed de cultural magazine Boca de Polen at the same university. He attended in 2004 the courses in The University of Valladolid corresponding to the doctorate degree entitled Don Quixote and the modern novel.

Iván Oñate was born in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1948. Poet and narrator. He made college studies in Quito, Argentina and Spain where he was doctorated in Communication (Semiotics) from the Universidad Autónoma of Barcelona. Part of his work has been translated into German, French, English, Portuguese, Italian and Greek. He is currently professor of semiotics and Hispanic-American Literature at The School of Language Science and Literature of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of The Central University of Ecuador. Published works: Estadía Poética, 1968; En Casa del Ahorcado, 1977; El Ángel Ajeno, 1983; El hacha enterrada, 1987, Anatomía del Vacío, 1988; El Fulgor de los Desollados, 1992; La canción de mi compañero de celda, poetic prose, 1995 and La nada sagrada, 1998. Jean Franco and Jean-Marie Lemogodeuc, authors of the Anthology of Hispanic-American literature of the XX century, published in France, say about him: “In him probably the most original poet of the new generation emerges: we must be aware of his disturbing visions, of his taste for life and vertigo, of his mad revelations mixed with anguish and craze. For Ecuadorian poet Filoteo Samaniego: “Oñate takes his own path and he gets on through it with resolution as Lautréamont, Pablo Palacio did before him or any of those poets that refused within themselves the right to smile.”. The American poet Alfred Corn was in agreemente with these criteria in respect to Oñate: “I have confirmed my impression that I had in regards to his extraordinary skillfulness in the art of poetry. Besides that, you also possess a persuasive ability for fiction. Few poets can pretend this, but your work reveals as a proof to that possibility. The fusion between philosophy and imagination to create a new mysterious and musical amalgam. “Your originality shows strongly when one considers both styles at the same time” The Uruguaian journalist and writer Kintto Lucas wrote about Oñate: “Emissary of pain and frolic, of dream and reality, of thunder and utopias, of the question and restlessness, this is the best message from a generation of poets afflicted by the daily fight against the shadows”.

Oswaldo Sauma was born in Costa Rica in 1949. Poet and poetry anthologist, he has published in this same genre, the books: Las huellas del desencanto, 1983; Retrato en familia, Premio Latinoamericano EDUCA, 1985; ASABIS, 1993; Madre nuestra fértil tierra, 1997; Bitácora del iluso, 2000; in process of publishing is Farewell. He has also made the anthologies: Poesía infantil del Conservatorio Castella, 1986; Antología del Conservatorio Castella, 1990; Los signos vigilantes, antología de poesía ecológica, 1992; Tierra de nadie, antología de nueve poetas latinoamericanos, 1994; La sangre iluminada, antología de seis poetas latinoamericanos, 1998; and Martes de poesía en el Cuartel de la Boca del Monte, 1998. As Raúl Zurita says: “… The moving playful and devastated tone that glitters through all his verses where “Homer and Ulises burn the ships again” as he says to us in the impressive verse that ends the book Bitácora del iluso, it shows the sadness of a world that hasn’t come to be as it has happened before so many times. Therefore, his poem “Recuento”, for example, that reminds the shocking voice of an Ungaretti writing from the trenches of the First World War, upheaves as a true manifesto of an extended defeat. From a calamity that appears engraved in the heart of this ending and beginning of the millennium and that presents itself, in an increasing way amidst the shrilling fanfare of the market, under the forms of emptiness and disencounter. The poetry of Oswaldo Sauma approaches this disencounter, as I have very rarely perceived it before. The implacable sadness, demolishing of its poems, as that of Ungaretti, Cioran or Kavafis, is in summary the same for us, and if it finally upheaves as a radical critic to the world, to the existence, to reality such as we have been experiencing it, it is because the poems that reflect it, direct, concrete, tangible reach mastery…” In that sense, his poem “Recuento”, for example, that remembers.

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Chapelton, a little town in Jamaica, on August 24, 1952. Poet and musician, he moved to London in 1963, where he made his high school studies and undergraduate studies in sociology at The University of London. Still a student, he developed his work with Rasta Love, a group of poets and percussionists. Among his poetry books are : Voices of the Living and the Dead, 1974; Dread Beat An’ Blood 1975; and Inglan is a Bitch 1980. Some of his albums are: Forces of Victory (las fuerzas de la victoria), 1979; Bass Culture (Cultura del bajo), 1980; LKJ in dub, 1981 and Making History (Haciendo historia), 1983. LKJ, the recording company of Mr. Johnson, was launched in 1981. During the eighties, he was involved in journalism, working side by side with the collective Race Today based in Brixton. His radio series of 10 parts about the popular Jamaican music was put on air in Radio 1 from The BBC in 1982. Recorded in The Queen Elizabeth Hall of London, the album LKJ live concert with the dub band (LKJ live in concerte with the dub band) was produced independently in 1985. After this, Tings an’ Times in 1991 which is also the title of his selected poems co-published by Bloodaxe Books and LKJ music publishers the same year. His most recent album is LKJ Capella Live (LKJ A Capella live) which is a collection of 14 poems including some unpublished ones. He has traveled around the world from Japan to Southafrica, from Europe to Brazil and his work has been translated into Italian and German. It’s not a surprise that he is known and venerated as the first dub poet of the world. He has been named in many ways as “the widely claimed cult heroe of England” (The South African Star) or “The first dub poet” (The Scotsman). He is seen as “One of the most original and influential voices of England” (England Council for the Arts) and it’s said about him that he “gives a language to a people without language” (The Glasgow Herald). “His poetry tried to reestablish structures and lost identities, pure poetry of “rhythm and roots” that integrates the interpreter and the audience into one whole collective voice (Cyril Dabydeen, World Literature Today).

Jorge Miguel Cocom Pech was born in Calkini, Campeche, Mexico, in 1952. Poet, narrator, essayist and professor in Maya language and Spanish. He made studies of Communication Sciences, Pedagogy, agronomy and sociology. From 2002 to 2005, he was president of The Directive Council of Writers in Indigenous languages, A. C: national organization that gathers poets, narrators, playwrights and essayists from Mexico. His book Muk’ult’an in Nool, Grandpa’s secrets, bilingual text maya-spanish, has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Romanian and Arabic. He has participated in encounters, congresses and festivals related to indigenous cultures in Canada, United States, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela. The literary critic Alejandra Flores, from the extinguished newspaper La Voz del Caribe de Cancún, Quintana Roo in regards to the book Grandpa’s secrets says: “Few books get to make poetry from its first pages, few that hold your hand and take you through mystery paths and gift you with a metaphore in every step, revelations that appear in a natural way and however are a result of a wisdom of life. Cocom Pech, owner of a pen that recognizes the beauty of the concept is at the same time a crafted writer, a word hunter that measures with certainty the emotional effect of a phrase…” In the prologue to the book Grandpa’s secrets, Miguel León Portilla emeritus professor of The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico points out: “The Mexican literature- and I dare saying world literature- enrich themselves with productions such as this. Beyond any kind of magic realism, with its metaphors, parallelisms and evocations, it reenacts into the present, the wisdom and beauty of the ancient word transformed into a torrent of life. The Chilean writer Jaime Valdivieso in regards to Cocom’s Pech work points out: “from the very first reading he made from his book in the Poetry Workshop of Writers in Indigenous Languages in Temuco, Chile I was profoundly moved by his narrations. Not only do we see there the millenary wisdom of his ancestors and of a whole people but the mastery, he has been able to transfer into writing, the ethical and philosophical message of his grandfather. In a sober prose, without any kind of tinsel besides the one corresponding to the similes and metaphors typical of poetry with which the primitive people see and conceive nature, man and cosmos (poetry is the language of a primitive people, Heidegger says), gives us a text not only of great testimonial anthroplogical and ethical value, but at the same time an autonomous universe of extraordinary beauty, without losing that cadency and spontaneity typical of the oral tradition.

Lucila Nogueira was born in Brazil. She is a poet, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic, university professor and translator. She has published 15 poetry books: Almenara, 1979; Pecho abierto, 1983; Quasar, 1987; La dama de Alicante, 1990; Libro del desencanto, 1991; Ainadamar, 1996; Ilaiana, 1997-2000; Zinganares, 1998; Imilce, 1999; Amaya, 2001; La cuarta forma del delirio, 2002; Reflectores, 2002; Bastidores, 2002; Desespero blue, 2003 and Estocolmo, 2004. Her first book, Almenara, obtained the poetry prize Manuel Bandeira from The Government of the State of Pernambuco, en 1978. That prize was given again by Quasar, in 1986. As an essayist, she published Ideology and literary form in Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 2002. The legend of Fernando Pessoa, 2003, in preparation is the book El cordon encarnado, her doctorate thesis about the books El perro sin plumas and Muerte y vida Severina of Joao Cabral de Meklo Neto. She is postgraduate professor in Literature and linguistics at the Federal University of Pernmbuco where she teaches Portuguese literature, Brazilian literature, Theory of Literature and Portuguese Language. She directed the department of literature from 1998 to 1999. She is the member of The Academia Pernambucana of Philology and from the Brazilian Academy of Philology with headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. Since seven years ago, she publishes the lusophone magazine Encuentro. She belongs to the Editorial Committee of the online magazine “mafua” from The Federal University of Santa Catarina and collaborates in the virtual magazine “Aguja”. Published by Floriano Martins and Claudio Willer. Hers is a voice that comes from the chant of the ancient sibillas to the more characteristic sounds of the present time, it goes between the most explicit sexuality amd the more abstract levels of spirituality, it deepens in the tragic sense of life and besides seeks the most delicate instant; it goes from the serenity of a crystalline water lake and the electric thunder of the human storm, it passes from sublime beauty to a contusive narration about issues related to modernity, it represents a crossing of readings and personal experiences, from its Iberic ancestrality to the mythic Southamerican archetype, a Brazilian diction that breaks with the experimental intellectualism, already worn out in the beginnings of this century, it rescues the fantasy and the spontaneity by guiding us by the means of an intimacy full of referring atmospheres into other geographies and other worlds.

Eduardo Espina was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1954. Poet and college professor in several universities of the continent. He obtained his doctorate in Philosophy from The Washington University of St. louis, U.S.A. He has published the poetry books: Valores personales, 1982; La Caza Nupcial, 1993; El oro y la liviandad del brillo, 1994; Coto de casa, 1995; Lee un poco más despacio, 1999; Mínimo de mundo visible, 2003; El cutis patrio, 2004. He also published the essay books: El disfraz de la modernidad, 1992; Las ruinas de la modernidad, 1995, Premio Nacional de Ensayo de Uruguay, 1996; and Un plan de indicios, Premio Nacional de Ensayo de Uruguay, 2000. In 1998 he obtained the Municipal Poetry Prize for the book Deslengue. His poems have been translated partially into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Croatian. Included in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and more than 20 anthologies of Latinamerican poetry, among them Medusario of The Fondo de Cultura Económica. In 1980, he was the first Uruguaian writer to attend The International Writing program from The University of Iowa. Since then he lives in the U.S. where he publishes the Hispanic Poetry Review, magazine devoted exclusively to the literary critics and to review the poetry written in Spanish. In 2003 the book Configuración sintáctica: poesía del deslenguaje was published in Chile, it is a comprehensive study about the poetic work of Espina written by tha Spanish linguist Enrique Mallén.

Mery Yolanda Sánchez was born in El Guamo, Tolima, Colombia, in 1956. She has published La ciudad que me habita, 1989 and Ritual para las noches, 1997. Her poems, short stories, literary comments and book reviews have appeared in different anthologies and magazines of her country, Venezuela and Brazil. She was awarded with The National Scholarship of 1998 from The Ministry of Culture for her project Poetry in staging (Scenic proposal for poet’s performance that takes place in Bogota since 1993). She has directed poetry workshops for children, youngsters, prisoners and people that live in the streets. She designed and developed for the Human Rights Committee the project Puente Experimento Piloto (theater, dance and literature as liberators from interfamily violence). She directs the Free Association for the Arts –Alartes- entity of artistic and cultural action that makes technical and logistical production for events in auditoriums as well as massive events. In his own words: “I learn from the sound and the noise of these years that have gone through the prolongation of a drop in the transversal axis that has overcrossed my generation: the war. My father took out Little Red Riding Hood from the house, to talk to me loudly about his own news and tell me about the present historic moment. Through tango my mother showed me how much weight and content a word had; and my brothers lost in the decency of teaching never asked me why I didn’t want to be a teacher like them, maybe that silence allowed me to break the schemes that were then imposed on traditional families and seek in other essences the window to recognize in my friends how good it is to be. Since the day my brothers painted with charcoal a radio in a pole in the house’s backyard and they danced, I knew that I wouldn’t have any kind of problems to sustain myself and this country of mine full of confusions and yells of independence in the carnivals of treason became the biggest database for my creative work.

Allan Gerardo Luna was born in Bogotá on December 8, 1957. Drawer, Self-Taught (all his life) and word labrador since 1986. In 1.987 the Maestro Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, that presided the jury of The Nacional Exhibition of Artists from Nariño “Pasto 450 años” awarded him the special prize Casa de La Cultura of Nariño. In 1991 and 2006, he obtained the second and first prize respectively in The Exhibition of Artists of Nariño “Victoriano Salas”. In 1989, by a contest summoned by the embassy of The Federal Republic of Germany and The Cultural Area of The Banco de la República of Colombia, he receives the first prize. In 1993, he obtained the second prize in the Departamental Poetry Prize “Luis Felipe de la Rosa”. In 1998, The Cultural Review RETO awarded him with the First Prize of The Departmental Poetry Prize organizad by the Diario del Sur. From 2002 to 2004, he coordinated and produced along with Mario Fernando Mora the cultural program “Mordiente” in Radio University of Nariño. Recently within the program of Humanistic Studies of The University of Nariño, he directed the “Workshop of graphic and literary expression”.

María Soledad Quiroga was born in Santiago de Chile in March 22 of 1957. She has the Bolivian citizenship. She made studies of Sociology and Literature. She has published the poetry books: Ciudad Blanca, 1993; Recuento del agua, 1995; Maquinaria mínima, 1995; Casa amarilla, 1998; Los muros del claustro, 2004; and Islas reunión, -cuentos-, 2006. Her work has appeared in diverse anthologies, among them: Poemas en Escritoras de América del Sur, 1996; Cuento en Antología del cuento femenino en Bolivia, 1997; El aliento en las hojas. Otras voces en la poesía boliviana, 1998 and Poemas en Una revelación desde la escritura. Interview to Bolivian woman poets, 2001. She has been a columnist for The Newspaper La Prensa in La Paz and in The Weekly Journal Pulso in the same city. According to the words of the Bolivian poet Eduardo Mitre: Maria Soledad Quiroga threads dramatically a poetics of time based in a poetics of space which is expressed in the city, the high plateau and the concrete objects. However in the conquered acceptation that the universe and our mutable identity are made up from its enigmatic nature symbolized by the water they appear an ethics and an erotica that opens a path towards reconciliation. In regards of Casa Amarilla by the way: With a smooth and spontaneous writing as they are the waves that form and expand by the plain surface of a lake, she prolongs and deepens that poetics of intimacy already present in her prior books: lovable poetry that goes by with the stealth of a snake that slides through it as an emblem of the mutations of desire and the never ending metamorphosis of reality. (…) So, the half opened door of Casa Amarilla guides us to an epiphany expressed with the clearest voice of the actual Bolivian poetry.

Cesar Seco was born in Coro, State of Falcón, Venezuela in January 29, 1959. Poet, essayist and publisher. Founder of the poetry House “Rafael José Alvarez” and of The Literature Biennal “Elías David Curiel”. Director of the magazine OIKOS. At the beginnings of the eighties he took part of the literary group Cráter and actually belongs to The Web of Writers of Venezuela. He has been awarded twice with the Municipal Prize of The Mayorship of Miranda State of falcon (1993 and 2000). With the book El viaje de los Argonautas and other poems he obtained The Biennal Poetry Prize “Ramón Palomares” ( Trujillo, 2005). He collaborated of the literary supplement Verbigracia of the diary El Universal. He integrates the magazine Poesía from The University of Carabobo. He has published the books: El laurel y la piedra, 1991; Árbol sorprendido, 1995; Oscuro ilumina, 1999 and Mantis, 2004. Poems and essays by him have been published in national and international magazines. He has participated as well in literary events such as The Biennals “Elias David Curiel” (Coro), “José Rafael Pocaterra” (Valencia) and “Mariano Picón Salas” (Mérida), The I National Encounter of Young Writers (Maracaibo, 1989) in the Round Table of the poetry from Venezuela (Cumaná, 1993), The II Literature Encounter of Literature from carabobo (1989). The International Poetry Week in Caracas (1999), I International Encounter of The Magazine Poesía (Valencia, 2002), International Book Fair (Mérida,1999), (Maracaibo,2002), Caracas (2003), The I y II Poetry World Festival (Caracas, 2004,2005), The International Book Fair La Habana (2006) and the International Poetry Festival of La Habana (2006). Vertical axis, heaven and hell gate, the tree is one of the emblematic figures in Cesar Seco’s poetry. Planted in the night it receives the infinite; agitated by the wind its branches swing as an infuriated long hair to the rhythm of the stars. Hieratical and insomniac, it resists the climate mutations and the flood charges. Inhabitant of two worlds, the tree sinks its roots in the obscurity the same as it expands its arms towards the luminous border. “The tree grows in the middle of the night… Its branches reach the sky” And in it will be founded the symbolism of what ascends. Image of nostalgia, its structure draws with fairness the cosmic fusion which the man has lost, bended over his mental harshness, its arms spread out as a nervous system that shocks the wind. Its intricate spreading develops the issue of communication with the wholeness; its branches seem like the infinite bifurcations that creation took since its sunk origin.

Cynthia James was born in Trinidad and Tobago where she lives and teaches. She is a lecturer in Language Education in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. She graduated from Howard University, Washington, D.C. with a Ph.D. in English in 1998. Academically, Cynthia is published in journals and books such as World Literature Today, Wasafiri, Jouvert: A Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, and For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite. She has one book of literary criticism, The Maroon Narrative, a narrative history of Caribbean literature in English, published by Heinemann in 2002. Cynthia is a writer of poetry and fiction. She has three collections of poetry, Iere, My Love, Vigil, and La Vega and other poems. Her second novel Sapodilla Terrace was published earlier this year, 2006. Her creative work can be found in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Writers of the Caribbean, The Massachusetts Review, the New Theater Review, the Farleigh Dickinson Review, and regionally in the Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, and the Caribbean Writer. Cynthia has twice been a James Michener fellow at the University of Miami Caribbean Writers Summer Institute. She has also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Award for studies in classic literary texts of the English-speaking Caribbean. In 2004 she was a visiting writer and fellow at the Hong Kong Baptist University International Writers Workshop, and in 2005 she was a participant in the 29th Cambridge Seminar on contemporary literature at Cambridge University, UK.

Alberto Rodríguez Tosca was born in Artemisa, Havana, Cuba, in 1962. poet, essayist and fiction writer. He has published : Todas las jaurías del rey (Premio David de Poesía, 1987), Otros poemas (Premio Nacional de la Crítica, 1992), Silvio Rodríguez: entre el espanto y la ternura (Premio Nacional de Periodismo 1994: entrevista, fragmento), and El viaje, 2003. His poems and short stories have appeared in anthologies published in Cuba, Spain, Argentina, México, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Austria, Italy and The United States. He studied Radio, Television and Film Direction in The Faculty of Audiovisual media of the Superior Institute of Art (ISA) of Havana. He has been writer and director of radio programs, specialist of Houses of Culture and Literary workshops, publisher of the Colombian weekly Suburbia Capital and the newspaper Urbe and publisher of Horas. Actually he is Chief of the writing staff of the literary journal La Sangrada Escritura and teacher at The International Institute of Film and Television “Isla de Mediodía” in Colombia. According to Juan Manuel Roca, “ the words in the poems of Rodríguez Tosca ride on wounded images, for them an underground humor serves as a lifesaver. Ever since I started reading his poetry it has trapped me and seduced the germinal power of his word. Away from the tyranny of prudence, the poetics of our Cuban friend feels good by walking through unusual paths and falling to the abyss as a John Doe at his house.

Odi Gonzales was born in Cusco, Peru, in 1962. He learned simultaneously Quechua and Spanish. In Arequipa, he made his secondary studies. In the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa, he studied Industrial Engimeering and Literature. Between the years of 1990-2000, he was college professor. Moreover, later on he won a scholarship with The University of Maryland, College Park where he made his postgraduate studies in Latinamerican Literature and he taught Quechua Language and Culture. In USA he also worked as a translator from Quechua and as an investigator for National Geographic Televison, The Smithonian, National Museum of American Indian, and National Foreign Language Center of Washington D.C. He currently lives in Cajamarca, Peru devoted to his doctoral thesis in Oral Quechua Tradition. He has published the poetry books: Juego de niños, 1988; Valle Sagrado, 1993; Almas en pena, 1998; Tunupa/El libro de las sirenas, 2002; and La escuela de Cusco, 2005. In 1996, he published the book of essays The Condemned or the anguished soul in the oral Andean tradition. In 1992, he received The National Poetry Prize “César Vallejo” from The Diario del Comercio of Lima and in the same year, he was awarded with the National poetry prize of The Major National University of San Marcos in Lima. Bilingual and an expert in the Quechua oral tradition, he works a very attractive issue: the Andean fabulation, the indigenous cosmogony and its traditional routines. And he does it with a clean and dry stroke whose effectiveness he proves thanks to the precise dosification of the narrator’s and character’e voices. His biggest contribution has been to incorporate voices coming from the Quechua oral language into the poetic speech, reaching a coral poetry, polyphonic with different levels of language, a mixture of voices that converge in each one of his poems.

Charo Guerra was born in Limonar, Matanzas, Cuba, in 1962. She has published: Un sitio bajo el cielo (Ediciones Matanzas, 1991), la plaquette Los inocentes (Ediciones Vigía, 1993), and Vámonos a Icaria (Letras Cubanas, 1998) which was awarded in the Pinos Nuevos Award, from The Instituto Cubano del Libro. Poems and short stories published in anthologies of those genres in Cuba and abroad. He obtained in 2001, The AwardDador from The Instituto Cubano Del Libro with the book project (still unpublished), El Bazar de las Cosas Perdidas, and in 2005 the literary scholarship of The Cuban Artists Fund. She published during six years the magazine Gaceta of Cuba with different publications of her country.

Omar Pérez was born in La Habana, Cuba, in 1964. Poet, essayist and translator. Graduate on Language and English Literatura from The University of Havana, 1987, he has also made studies of Italian and Dutch language. He has published three poetry books: Algo de lo sagrado, 1996; Oíste hablar del gato de pelea, 1999; Canciones y Letanías, 2002 as well as the collection of essays La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro, 2000, National Prize of Critics. The publishing house Norma has published his versión Como les guste of the Shakespeare classic As You Like it. He has participated in the Festival Poetry Internacional Rótterdam of 2002, as well as in The International Book Exhibition. From his poetry it saben said: Poetry that takes the place of the instant with the same naiveness and simplicity with which other poets try to inhabit in the transcendence. The author uses shyness at the moment of incorporating spaces, there where relevance relies in what is efimerous. Sometimes the verse transforms into key, rhythm and song. Therefore, without intending to create literature, he enters the path of poetry.

Fabián Casas was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1965. Poet, narrator, novelist, essayist, philosopher and journalist. He published: Fall, poems of detoxication and sadness, 1985; Tuca, 1990; El Salmón, 1996, First Latinamerican poetry prize, summoned by the magazine Prometeo; Oda, 2003; and The Spleen of Boedo, 2003. He published in prose: Ocio (Novel, 2000) and The Lemmings (narrative, 2006). In 1998, he participated in The International Program of Writers from the city of Iowa, U.S.A, where he gave conferences and participated in the poetry workshop. In 2003, he was awarded with the translation fellowship Antorchas for El Spleen de Boedo. His poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Armenian and Italian. He has also been included in numerous anthologies in Latinamerica. In Jose Luis Mangieri´s words: “we said yesterday, when Tuca was published, 1990, Fabian Casas was family”.

Jaime Luis Huenún was born in Valdivia in 1967. He belongs to the Mapuche nation. His work has received many distinctions and has been compilated in several anthologies, for being one of the Mapuche-Huilliche poets of greatest importance. In 1996 and 1997 he obtained financing from The Fund for Development of Art and Culture (Fondart) for his writing project: Ceremonias. Fragments of his poetry have appeared in magazines and national anthologies, among which they outstand: Cartas al Azar (selection of Chilean poetry), Ed. Ergo Sum, 1989, Emergency zone, Paginadura, Valdivia, 1994, and in foreign anthologies like Ül: Four Mapuche poets, American Society and Latinamerican Literary Rewiew Press New York 1998. He was awarded with the first prize in the “National Poetry Prize: El joven Neruda” Temuco 1999. he has published: Ceremonias (University of Santiago Publishing House), Puerto Trakl (LOM Editions, 2002), winner of the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, 2003. To the question: How do you think nature is marking the present Mapuche poetry? He stated: “The natural element is a substantial part of the vision of life and culture from the Mapuches. I write my poem in the forest hostels. The birds fly and erase what I write with their songs. There is a full contact with the natural surroundings, with the environment in terms of ancestral culture. And the Mapuche has great respect for the nature that surrounds him, that´s to say, all the spiritual maouche world is connected to nature. Part of this sacred vision of nature is transmitted to the poets. The Mapuche culture cannot be understood without this connection (to nature) since the word Mapuche means “people of the land”.

Nora Méndez was born in El Salvador in 1969. She has published the poetry books: Atravesarte a pie toda la vida, 2002 and La Estación de los Pájaros, 2004. Anthologized in 1996 by The University of Michigan in Poetics of the Resistance, her poetry is also represented in Woman of Salvadorian Literature, 1997, Words of the always woman, 1999 and currently her work is being anthologized in a study of young Central-American poetry by a Catalanian publishing house (La Garúa) and translated into German by the department of Hispanic-American Literature of The University of Humboldt of Berlin, Germany, for an online poetry anthology. She has participated in the second Poetry Festival of El Salvador and the First Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua.

Al Hunter is an Anishinaabe poet from Manitou Rapids, Rainy River First Nations. He has published his poetry in many journals and anthologies, including, Rampike; Canadian Literature; Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology; Poets Who Haven't Moved to Minneapolis; North Coast Review; New Breed; and Gatherings. His work is featured along with Jim Northrup, Denise Sweet and Adrian Louis in the acclaimed anthology, Days of Obsidian, Days of Grace, Poetry & Prose by Four Native American Writers published by Poetry Harbor, Duluth, MN, 1995. In March of 2000, Hunter was named an Anishinaabe for his work in education and the environment. In the the Summer of 2000, he and his wife, Sandra Indian, led "A Walk To Remember," a 1200 mile, sacred journey around Lake Superior "to bring forth community visions of protecting the air, land and water for the Seven Generations yet to come." This is his first book.

Eliana Maldonado was born in Medellín in December 20, 1978. Some short stories, a short novel and a collection of compilated poems in an unpublished book entitled Imprecaciones are the outcome of ten years of work. Actually she studies Petroleum Engineering in The Universidad Nacional de Colombia, she walks towards a mature, profound poetics which reveals the situation of her surroundings of the feminine condition of her country. First prize in the award of erotic poetry Jazz-Eros from The National University of Colombia, with the poem “Fuera del Paraíso”, 2005. He has published some of his poems in The Magazine Punto Seguido, issuje Number 48. Active participation in the radio program “Taller de Luna” from the radio station of The National University of Medellín. Her poetic work has a highly erotic content as well as sensitive, without falling in what is vulgar or prosaic, it is constant the use of analogies, where the metaphiores taken from the natural world, are transformed into feelings and human affection. A poetry marked by her own experiences and ways of looking the world, written in a simple and open language. She focuses the social problem with a smart look in front of the contemporary world. In her typically simple and clear way of expression, she makes subtle critics to the view which actually have different scientific and intellectual circles.

Lucía Estrada was born in Medellín on July 11, 1980. She has published the poetry books Fuegos Nocturnos (1997), Noche Líquida (1999), Maiastra (2004) and Las Hijas del Espino (2006). She obtained the Poetry prize in the V Summoning of Creation Poetry Prizes “Medellín 330 years”. Her poems have been included in different anthologies, reviews and newspapers nationally and internationally. She collaborates with the Spanish magazine Alhucema. Presently she is a member of the work team of The Corporation of Art and Poetry Prometeo. She says about her work: “ I attend writing as a ritual night, full of reminiscences and forgotten landscapes and it is their language and its silence the Ariadna’s thread that allow my permanence and guide me through the laberynth of a city that could be called in some other way since poetry transforms it for me into other of the vast regions of memory and desire. I write to open a little more, just a bit more, the crevice that I have with me since my birth. That everything that I have from the night, silence, the word as it is in all of its folds, that exiguous that however offers us an instant of absolute comprehension. That everything what I am occupies just one place, that fragile and stormy line, that ray drawing, of extreme shout in the profoundness of the tower. In my poems I aspire not to have a “before” or an “after”, that it is all the verticality of a mirror that breaks up, the sole stroke of destiny, the mystery of the surfaces, the ineffability of a body that jumps and breaks up forming laberynths, little maps that it already beared in its enameled face. To be or not to be the crevice word, wound or abyss. To be or not to be what they contain, the fragility of meaning, the signal, the movement, the tremor that prodeced it, its dim compressed shadow, its thunder without light unfolding, its syllable, without doubt the true one much befote being pronnounced. I write to feel… A convulse feeling that established me in pain, in madness, celebration and death. I write to feel it all until I lose my breath, until I get into the root of the own meaning, to submerge myself in it until I do not feel it any more. To read voices, the recovered gold under the fine surface of ice. My hand shivers when it borders the cutting edge of its Marcel, what remains of the night over me.”

Rosa María Chávez Juárez was born in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, in 1980. She participates in the poetry workshop in the Cultural metropolitan Center organizad by the Folio 114, her texts appear in the anthology of the USAC (Enrique Noriega workshop), alternative publications of the Folio 14 since 2003, collaborating in rhe organization of the poetry readings at a regional level, “Barriles”, 2003, Industrial 2004. She has participated in several poetry readings in cultural centres, public areas and in some departments. She is member of the collective Caja Lúdica, cuenta cuentos , and participates from the theater workshop of Caja Lúdica and Rayuela (independent theater). She appears in the newspaper XXI century as personality of the year in the Literature area.

Andrea Cote was born in Barrancabermeja, Santander, in 1981. She is a poet and college professor and she has been collaborator of The Internacional Poetry Festival of Medellín. She has published the books: Puerto Calcinado (Poemas, 2003); Blanca Varela y la escritura de la soledad (Ensayo, 2004); Una fotógrafa al desnudo (Biography of Tina Modotti, 2005). In 2002, she received the national young poetry prize of The University Externado de Colombia and in 2005 she received the World Poetry prize of Young Poetry “Bridges of Struga”, awarded by UNESCO and The Poetry festival of Macedonia. Her book Puerto Calcinado has been partially translated into English, French, Italian, Macedonian, Arabic and Catalanian. As Piedad Bonnett says: “Andrea Cote is nowadays one of the most important young voices of our poetry. Her work recreates, in an ambiguous language, full of meaning, a very personal world, of an intimate tendency, full of recurrent feelings that point out the urgency of its phantoms, the need to transform the experience in the word”. Moreover, in the words of Juan Manuel Roca “Her poems, attentive to the passing by of a rough time, reveal an impulse for not concealing neither tragedy nor oblivion in which it wraps our individual and collective drama. It is hers a reflective poetry that seeks the expresión of a calcinated landscape in fair images, in diverse rythms”.

Diana Milena Berrío was born in Medellín on September 9, 1985. She participated in the second session of literature and writing of Comfama (1999) with a publication in the memories. She worked as one of the organizers of the literature talk “ Nights of full moon and poetry” in the Fabricato-Comfama library from Bello during 2002 and since that same year she participates in the literature workshop “sala de Agua” of Comfenalco. She presently works in the workshops of the Project Gulliver from The Corporation of Art and Poetry Prometeo and the NGO France Liberté.

Viviana Restrepo was born in Medellín, Colombia:- About her poetry, in the words of Pedro Arturo Estrada: “We are born also with the first word. Word that breaks up, word that opens up as a womb and throws us from the primordial silence into the night of the world that is in its turn torned by time in incandescent wounds. For Viviana the matricial blood, the sacrificial blood, the lustral blood the different bloods that have marked her until now transform into ink that waits, that starts to pour into poetry and to burn beyond the body and the contingency of the steps, forever uncertain, in this city and these days of harassment . For Viviana, poetry is gestation of universality, laceration, slow consagration of life that agains longs for rebirth, for the revelation of otherness, the revelation of sacredness in the world. Thus, we attend; we have been invited to witness of that delivery of words that from the most obscure magma of her being convene us.

Poets from Asia 

Ramiz Rovshan (Ramiz Mammadali Oghlu Aliyev) was born in Baku, Azerbaijan on December 15, 1946. Poet, narrator and scriptwriter. He adopted the name “Rovshan” as a pen name. The word means “light” which also identifies the principal rebellious character of the Koroghlu legend. He graduated from The Faculty of Philosophy from The State University of Azerbaijan, in 1969. During a couple of years, at the end of the seventies he studied cinema in Moscow. His poems and short stories have been published in literary magazines, among them, Azerbaijan, Ulduz and Gobustan. Some movie pictures have been based in his scripts: The Grandfather of my Grandfather's Grandfather 1981; The Reapers from City, 1985; The Pain of Milk Tooth; Another Time and Life Tree. He is the author of poetry books such as Yaghishli Geja Goy Uzu Dash Sakhlamaz– (The sky cannot hold a stone) and Butterfly Wings. If we were to define Ramiz Rovshan’s poetry with just one word, it would be strangeness. All his work is impregnated with the surprise before the fact of being alive as well as his strangeness in relation to his own body that is poetically expressed throughout the fabulation he makes of himself:

Bassam Hajjar was born in Tyr, Lebanon in August 13 of 1955. poet, fiction writer, literary critic, translator, Publisher and journalist. He made studies of philosophy at The University of Lebanon and t The Sorbonne of Paris. Investigations, articles, literary critic and translations of his have been published between 1978 and 2002 in magazines Dutch such as “Al Fikr al Arabi al Muassir” “Nizwa” “Abwab” and in the newspaper “Al Nida” in Beirut. He was cofounder and editor in chief of “Al Mulhak”, weekly literary supplement of the newspaper “Assafir”, Beirut and since 1999 up to now editor of “Nawafiz” , weekly cultural literary supplement of the newspaper “Al Mustakbal”, in the same city. He has participated from several poetry readings and conferences in Asia and Europe. Part of his work has been translated into French, English, Italian and German. Publisher poetry books: Preoccupations of a Calm Man, 1980; I Recount As Though Fearing to See, 1985; If Only Your Hand, 1990; Cruel Professions, 1993; Book of Sand, 1999; A few Things, 2000 and You Shall Outlive Me, 2001. In fiction he has published: : In the Company of Shadows, 1992; Lexicon of Ardent Desires, 1994; Simple Fatigue, 1994; Story of a Man who loved a canary, 1996; Elegy of Betrayal, 1997; Family Album, The passerby a Night Landscape By Edward Hopper, 2004. As a translator he has translated nearly 60 works in the areas of Philosophy, Social Sciences and novel, among other authors he has translated works from: Martin Heidegger, Marguerite Yourcenar, Yasunari Kawabata, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gesualdo Bufalino, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Jacques Derrida, etc.

Muhin Al-Ramli was born in Iraq on March 7, 1967. Poet, novelist, playwright, narrator, journalist and translator. He studied Spanish Philology at The University of Baghdad, 1989. He made his doctorate in Philosophy, Letters and Spanish Philology at The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2003. Thesis: The traces of Islamic culture in Don Quixote. Published books: Regalo del siglo que viene, Amman, 1995; En busca de un corazón vivo, Madrid, 1997; Hojas lejanas del Tigris, Amman, 1998; Migajas esparcidas, El Cairo, 1999; Las felices noches del bombardeo, El Cairo 2003; and Todos somos viudos de las respuestas, Madrid 2003. He has translated into Arabic some works of Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega and José de Espronceda, among others. He was awarded the Prize for The Young Writers, Baghdad 1988 for his story El último encuentro con un amigo and the same prize in 1989, for his story Un accidente de copia. He has worked as journalist in Iraq, Jordan, and Spain. Since 1992, he is a member of The Association of Iraqui Translators. He has given conferences about Iraqui and Arab literature, translation and about Don Quixote. He is founder, publisher and co-publisher of the cultural review ALWAH since 1997 (The only arabic cultural magazine in Spain) Some of his texts have been translated into English, Spanish, German, Catalanian and Kurdish.. In his own words: “In my country, poetry isn’t considered a luxurious complement but a need. It is not just a mean of expression but it becomes a vivid experience and furthermore an expression for life itself. Thanks to poetry, the individual lives what he wasn’t allowed to live. Poetry enriched Iraq more than oil, which has rather brought catastrophes to the nation. The Arabic Peninsula and Iraq are the only places in the world where the birth of a poet was celebrated because he was going to be the spokesperson of the tribe. Laws, teaching and history will be written in verse. Still today among my people, letters are written in verse. It’s the only place in the worlds where a poetry market existed, the one of Mirbad, in Basra where people from distant places gathered to buy, (especially those in love), sell, learn or criticize.

Huda Aldaghfag was born in Saudi Arabia on October 4, 1967. Poet, narrator, journalist and teacher. He graduated in Language and Arabic literature from The University of Riyadh in 1990. She is a member of the international association of press and has been an activist in pro of women´s rights. She has participated in several congresses related to the issues of woman, journalism and liberty in her country and abroad. During 5 consecutive years she participated in the prestigious festival Al Ganadriyah of Arabia. She has also represented her country in poetical festivals in Bahrein, Omán, Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Switzerland. In 2004, she obtained the prize for the best poetic activity in Arabia. She has published the poetry books: La sombra hacia arriba, 1993; Nueva pasión, 2002; y El bosque de las mariposas, 2005. In her new collection, Lahfah jadihah (New eagerness), Beirut, 2002 Huda offers another testimony to the fact that poetic talent recognizes no gender distinctions. Huda outstands in the poetic prose, a form not always celebrated in a conservative cultural milieu as the one dominating here, but which is nonetheless widely practiced. The concerns articulated so beautifully in several pieces of the new collection are diverse, but one can discern some that can be expected from a female poet, such as the fight for more independence and freedom. Yet the poet succeeds in going beyond this typical concern by offering the reader nice flashes that illuminate areas of meaning dimmed by habit and routine. One such poem tackles a wekll-known statement in Arabic culture that says “meaning is the poet’s belly” (i.e. only the poet knows the real meaning of his poem). Entitled “Meaning” the poem plays on the pun created by the similarity in Arabic between the word for poet “shair” and the word for street “shari”. The poet begins by assigning meaning to the street (“in the street’s belly) rather than the poet, tricking the reader into misreading the word and discovering the real situation later.

Mohammed J. Al-Nabhan was born in Sulaibkhat, Kuwait in April 10, 1971. After highschool, he worked as a calligrapher and graphic artist from 1989 to 1995 when he migrated to Canada and made advanced studies of Graphic Design and web pages. In 2000, he founded along with Karim Al-Hazzaa and his brother Saleh Al-Nabhan an electronic magazine which he considers as the bridge that crosses the silences of history and reality. He is the editor of the magazine Ofouq since that same year. In 2005, he founded along with Arab, American and Canadian writers the Cultural Foundation Jozoor a cultural independent non-profit organization interested in the Arab literature of the exile. His poems have been translated into Spanish and English. His name appears in several anthologies and he has translated many poets included in anthologies, from English into Arab. He has also published his poems and articles in different Arab literary reviews and newspapers. He published two poetry books: Another Exile (Al-Mada House, Damasco 2004) and My Blood Is a Stone in Your Still Door (Fundación Cultural Jozoor, 2005). Any exile poetry talks about pain. And it’s not different in Mohammed Al-Nabhan’s poetry. His verses are a portrait of the pain of the one who left his land and is confronted with an alienated reality away from his roots. For the exiled, poetry becomes his homeland and the poem his territory. In that metaphysical home, the poet constructs again his home, this time with words. Only in the poem, he can feel the liberty of crying out to heaven with full autonomy. As long as poetry exists, the human being will not feel totally alone, although pain never disappears. Every exile points out to a sensation of death, of living death, so we can see in his poem Winter. Me levanto cada mañana/En Enero/Cuento mis costillas/Costilla/Por costilla/Hasta la caída de la oscuridad/Duermo y sueño con el sol del verano. The sensation of strangeness to the fact of being alive, when the poet counts his ribs each morning shows clearly the absurdity of exile and its intimate relation with death. The poet is confronted face to face with a day-to-day “petite mort” and to wake up each morning with the surprise of not being in his homeland.

Poets from Europe

Antonio Porpetta was born in Elda, Alicante, Spain on February 14, 1936. He made Spanish philology and law studies. His first poetry volume, Por un cálido sendero was published in 1978. Since then he has published: Meditación de los asombros; Ardieron ya los sándalos; El clavicordio ante el espejo; Los sigilos violados; Territorio del fuego; Década del insomnio; Adagio mediterráneo; Silva de extravagancias; Penúltima intemperie, etc. and also of essays (Writers and Artists of Spain and The Sound World of Gabriel Miró, among others) and of prose (The benefactor and ten other short stories, Manual of Surviving for Spanish tourists). He has been translated into 10 languages. He has received, among others the Fastenrath prize (From The Royal Spanish Academy of Language) and the José Hierro Award. He has directed courses and conferences about the poetic creation in Universities and cultural centers in the five continents. In the prologue of As a deep silence of bells the Salvadorian poet David Escobar Galindo states: “The relation between Antonio Porpetta and poetry is very original, from the very first moment, he became allied with silence instead of the word. His first book dates from 1978, when he was 42 years old, and according to his own confession it wasn’t a tardy publishing, but a writing the author reached with time. He was a poet without writing; a reserved poet, surely without knowing it, in the storehouse of the inner materials. Since that first book, he drew the warm path. The path has been creating and recreating stations. The stations of a conscience that revives with an impeccable discipline the everyday amazements. Before life. Before time, before love, before destiny, before nostalgia, before death…” and farther on the Salvadorian poet says: “In a clean verse, white, fluent and captivating he goes on to reveal to us his experience of life. And the very fine task never ends to be what it was from the beginning: a joyful alliance between silence and the word. “There is a blue silence” he says in one of his poems from Meditation of Amazements. And the nostalgia of the words shows the poet as a longing for a greater voice, that from the neighboring but distant sea. Love makes the miracle: But you came and the sea came along with you. Love brought the word.

Hans. C. ten Berge was born in The Netherlands in 1938. He has published poems, fiction, essays and translations. Besides the version into Dutch of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and of contemporary poets, among them Kenneth White, Christopher Middleton and Xavier Villaurrutia, among others, he includes texts that are very distant from the western tradition, from The Japanese Noh to sacred Aztec hymns. His translations in the ethnological field finished with a collection in three volumes of the myths and the fables of the North American Indians, the esquimos and the Siberian population (1974-1979). Among his most important works in prose are the travel books The Bears of Churchill, 1978; the short novels Frozen Glass, 1982 and Autoportrait with a white wool cap, 1985 and the novel The secret of a happy attitude, 1986. Among his recent publications, we can find Raw material, poems, 1963-1993; The Traveler that loves his home, 1995; and Woman, Jealousy and other discomforts, 1996.

Stefaan van den Bremt was born in Belgium on October 12, 1941. Poet, essayist, playwright, translator and lyrics composer. Since 1968, he has published 18 poetry books. In een mum van taal / Gedichten 1968-2002 (in a handful of words, 2002) gathers great part of his artistic work, partially translated into English, French, German and Spanish. Mijn verbeelding is jouw slaaf niet (My imagination is not your slave), 1982 is a book of essays about Latinamerican poetry. Translator of Verhaeren, Maetrelinck, Brecht and Kafka and great diffuser of the Latinamerican Literature, he has translated the poetry of Nicolás Guillen, José Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, Jaime Sabines, Ramón López Velarde and Juan Gelman poetry into Dutch. His first poems announce neorrealism, but with a pronounced social implication. Gradually he gets to be known as the Flemish political poet of the seventies. In this period, his poetry deals about social issues such as the economic crisis, unemployment, politicians and businessmen. From the eighties on, his work gets a more intimist character in its content and more classic in its form. From political poetry, he moves into love and an erotic one. In his production of the nineties, playing with language takes a fundamental role. He often tells an autobiographical anecdote meanwhile at a more abstract level he makes an issue of the human condition. After The Second World War, the urgency in a formal and thematic renovation expressed the urgency of making tabula rasa of the horrors of war and for starting again. His ending point is the book Oostakkerse Gedichten, 1955 from Hugo Claus whose poetry at that time- that in the meanwhile has become a classic- is placed in the cutting edge of a tension between a very earthy and “animal” vitalism and of an erudite intelligence. The sprout of the experiment reactivated an impulse of restauration and it had the sixties as a result with its international calls for democratization, a return to day-to-day reality, to those more traditional issues and to a more directly accessible. In “My imagination isn’t your slave, 1982 he expressed in an adequate way his “personal” commitment: the writer, the poet that wants to contribute to human emancipation will just achieve it through a sharpened conscience from the ambivalence that makes language, dream, love, game, imagination sources for desperation for all the unidimensional spirits”.

Spiros Vergos was born in Athens, Greece, In 1945. Poet, narrator, diplomat and journalist. He exiled himself during the Greece dictatorship from 1967 and 1974. Progressive militant, in the restoring of democracy in his country, he participated actively in this process through his work as a journalist. He has published the poetry books: Abnonimíes; Martiría thanatu and riyes sto jrono, Piímata (Roots of a Time, 1970-1995). The Greek thing: sun impregnated death, he writes. In this verse, a fundamental dichotomy in his poetyic work resounds. By one side, the Hellenic sun which transcends human time and which illuminates, even in its agonic glitter, the infinite heaven of mythologies. This inheritance, this wise light remains in the language: in “the chant of a language which has its roots in my blood” By the other side, there is mortality, attached to history, in the inexorable time of crime and affliction that distribute the despotic powers. In addition, there is the guilt of those that not only were not capable of avoiding it but also perhaps encouraged it with their negligence. Therefore, history is lived as treason to time, as if that solar mythology was degradated to death. Myth then appears in a ghostly manner when confused with history’s profane time, as if its signs were specters emptied of substance and still then reverberate in the poem. “Helen/ sleepy in the voluptuous couches of Troy/winter in the cafes/full of old ladies/ stained with earings and syllogisms”. This dichotomy between myth and history is still away of presenting itself in an abstract way in his poetry: it is refered as a lyric confession, in bitter metaphors and merciless ironies that hardly disguise that ancient splendor that still remains in the memory of language: For that the poem is generally taken as a vendetta with the past, as an elegy in the present, as a future fear. Three key words give not just the title to three of Spiro’s poems but also resume three basic feelings of his implicit ars poetica: “guilt”, “fear”, “hope”. Just fear and hope remain for the poet-witness when he enumerates the days of his time. But also hope. In a world where the notion of polis and utopia have been exiled furiously, in a world where the luminous myth remains under the shadows, the fragile and stubborn hope remains, even without faith, in the act itself of poeticizing. “The god abandons dreams/ courage you in the salvation of man/ hope can inhabit in our desperation”.

Guadalupe Grande was born in Madrid, Spain, on May 30, 1965. Poet, narrator, literary critic and publisher. She is a graduate of Social Anthropology. She has published the poetry books: El libro de Lilith, Premio Rafael Alberti, 1995; Renacimiento, 1996 and La llave de niebla, 2003; the book entitled El relato Fábula del murciélago, obtained a mention in The Barcarola Prize in 1996. Her poems appear in several Spanish and Iberoamerican anthologies: Monographic about feminine poetry published by the Zurgai Review (Vizcaya, Julio, 2004), 33 de Radio 3 (Calamar/Rne3, Madrid, 2004) Writing and voice -80 poetic proposals from the Fridays of The Cacharrería- (Comunidad de Madrid/ONCE, Madrid, 2001), Woman of flesh and verse (La esfera literaria, Madrid, 2001), Poetic Village II (Ópera Prima, Madrid, 2000); Dialogue of the Language. Turn the page, poets for the new millenium, Milenio, North and South in Iberoamerican Poetry, The very last poetry, They have the word and From open Spain. I write the word defeat and I think in the word meaning: in the sense of embracing the last wave, to embrace the embers and the memory that in the center of each word, to the ashes from which the memory burns in the eyes, the oceanic and ashy hole where the words fall through and which I feel as the only possible joint. To see, to look, to talk. I think about words, about their embers, their ashes, their sound, their music of meaning. I think in poetry as words in a shipwreck. I think in each poem as in the last words of this shipwreck, of this necessary defeat: I don’t know if I’m approaching my thinking”.

Poets from Oceania

Michael Harlow was born in The United States in 1937. Poet, narrator, publisher, scriptwriter and Jungian psicotherapist. Born from a Greek father and a Ucranian mother he traveled extensively through Europe until he arrived in Australia where he naturalized as citizen of New Zealand in 1968. Some of his works are: Poems, 1965; Events, 1974; The Book of Quiet, 1974; Nothing But Switzerland and Lemonade, 1980 (first prose-poetry book published in New Zealand); Today is the Piano’s Birthday, 1981; Vlaminick’s Tie, 1985 and Giotto’s Elephant, 1991, finalist in The National Book Awards, 1991. During 10 years, he published the literary magazine Landfall. He has also published short prose, essys and critical reviews and different publications and anthologies. He obtained The Katherine Mansfield Fellow. He has written a script for documentaries, Heavy traffic in the Dark in collaboration with the filmmaker Stephanien Donald. More recently, working with the Swiss-New Zealander composer Kit Powell, he wrote the script for the performance The Tower of Babel that has been presented in The International Arts Festival of Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1995. In 2004 he was writer in residence Frendell Cottage and in 2005 The University of Auckland published his more recent poetry collection: Cassandra´s Daughter. According to Elizabeth Smither in his lyric and prose poem texts the “persistent imaginal” goes in search of a language to articulate something of the curious and surreal strangeness of the everyday. Poems that through the micro-worlds of the art, the circus, theatre, and dreams look around corners and behind the mirror to explore how it is we are so mysterious to others and ourselves; whose clarity is in the nature and manner of the questions asked, rather than in the easy answer given. Characteristic of the curve of Harlow’s imagination, it is a poetry “where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world”. “Poems packed with image and thought that stride boldly between the world as we know it and the world with its so-called civilized top layer scraped off: Love poems that are profound on several levels, and prose-poems as always splendid and authoritative.