An Evening with Connie Mae Oliver and Kelly Martínez-Grandal

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event. Want your copy early or can't make it in-person?

dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep in Venezuelan culture. In these poems, the fluidity of living in two languages reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on the speaker's relationship with her mother, grandmother, and homeland. The ancient forests around Mount Roraima and the bright pink sands of Playa Colorada inhabit her dreams, and in these topographies she finds harmony with the patterns of brain waves in her sleep studies. Meaning both "nightgown" and "sleepyhead" in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to language memory, family, geography, and history.

Connie Mae Oliver is a poet and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book of poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me (Operating System, 2017) is about nuclear disarmament. Her second book, Science Fiction Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is an homage to Miami-Dade County and color photography in the early aughts.

Kelly Martínez-Grandal is a poet, essayist, editor and curator of photography. In 1993 her family left their home in Cuba for a new life in Venezuela, where she earned a bachelor's degree in Art History and a master's degree in Comparative Literature at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). Upon her graduation, Martínez-Grandal was invited to join the Faculty at the School of Arts. After the escalation of the political crisis in Venezuela, she found herself forced to migrate to Miami, in 2014. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of Funcionarte, a non-profit organization aimed at raising awareness about gender violence through literature and the arts as a means to empower survivors of domestic violence. Martínez-Grandal's first collection of poetry, Medulla Oblongata, was published in 2017 by CAAW Ediciones. Her work has been included in many anthologies, the most important being 100 mujeres contra la violencia de género. In 2021, her book Zugunruhe won the Silver Medal in the bilingual book category, Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry Prize of the International Latino Book Awards. In 2024, she won the Cintas Foundation Fellowship in Creative Writing.

Host or Publisher Books & Books