Translating Islands: A Reading and Conversation

Join us for "" a reading and conversation with Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Urayoán Noel who will discuss Delgado’s artist book adjacent islands/islas adyacentes (Ugly Duckling Presse/DoubleCross Press/La Impresora, 2022), translated by Noel, as it engages questions of writing, translation, memory, decolonization, ecology, and the materiality of book and the islandscapes and geographies it embodies. The conversation will emphasize bookmaking as an ecofeminist, collaborative practice of community that links the Puerto Rican archipelago to the Caribbean and the hemisphere, including New York. Following the conversation, Delgado and Noel will read from the book.
Wed, Nov 13, at 6:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center 365 5th Ave, NYC.
This event is free and open to the public. Please Register to attend.

Nicole Cecilia Delgado is a poet, translator, and book artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her writing, often reviewed within the framework of ecofeminism and land art, explores the subtleties and contrasts of everyday Puerto Rican and Caribbean life, with an emphasis on place and territory. Her collection of poems Periodo especial (Ediciones Aguadulce & La Impresora, 2019), explores the fiscal crisis in Puerto Rico through the socioeconomic mirrors of the Greater Antilles. She recently published: A mano/By Hand, an autobiographical essay about independent publishing (Ugly Duckling Presse Pamphlet Series 2020, La Impresora/EEE, 2023), and the bilingual poetry anthology Adjacent Islands/islas adyacentes (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022, translated to English by Urayoán Noel). She is the founder and co-director of La Impresora, a poetry press and Risograph print shop dedicated to small-scale editorial work in Puerto Rico.

Urayoán Noel is the translator of no budu please (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) by Wingston González and adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022) and the editor and translator of Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books, 2018), a finalist for the National Translation Award. Noel teaches at NYU and is the author of eight books of poetry as well as the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award.

Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s book art is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked in its pages and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. adjacent islands/islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language). Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls “camping books,” adjacent islands / islas adjacentes seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where “communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.” Call it book art as counterarchive.

This event is organized and co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, and CENTRO (The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College).

Host or Publisher The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY