Cuier w/ Natalia Affonso, Bruna Dantas Lobato & Johnny Lorenz
Department: Intl. Center for Writing and Trans.
Date and Time: September 28, 2021 | 4:30 PM-5:30 PMEvent Location: Online event
Event Details
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For the first time, and against the backdrop of Bolsonaro’s emboldened far-right regime, Brazil’s legendary and pioneering queer writers appear together in English translation.This far-reaching, bilingual assortment of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography—erotic and personal, revolutionary, hopeful, joyous, and bitter—continues the legacy of defiant queer expression in Brazil and demands its prolific, unapologetic future.
In fresh and poetic prose, Raimundo Neto brings us lesser-known narratives of queer life in rural Brazil, including the story of a boy determined to become the “harvest bride” at a the local annual harvest dance. Poet Angélica Freitas details a disturbingly familiar world in which women are divided into rigid binaries—clean or dirty, good or bad—with stark language that builds into utter absurdity. And Caio Fernando Abreu sits in a hospital dying of AIDS, meeting with angels and writing letters in which he repeats “all I can do is write” like a mantra. Spanning four decades, and featuring a total of thirteen writers, Cuíer reminds us again, as Natalia Affonso says in her translation of Tatiana Nascimento’s poem:
…what we make
lying down is
also
revolution.
Natalia Affonso is a translator, teacher, researcher, and activist who sometimes commits poems. She’s from Rio de Janeiro, where she created and hosted the literary salon Sapatão & Ficção. She holds an MA in English-language literature and is currently pursuing her PhD in comparative literature at UC Irvine, focusing on Caribbean and Brazilian queer/cuir/lesbian literature and is interested in how these two can make decolonizing love together.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and literary translator from Portuguese. Her translations of Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries (winner of a 2019 PEN/Heim) and No Dragons in Paradise are forthcoming from Archipelago Books.
Johnny Lorenz (b. 1972), son of Brazilian immigrants, is a poet, translator, critic, and professor of English at Montclair State. His book of poetry, Education by Windows, was published by Poets & Traitors Press (2018). His translations of Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life (2012), finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and The Besieged City (2019), listed as one of the best books of 2019 by Vanity Fair, were published by New Directions. He recently received a PEN/Heim grant in support of his translation of Notebook of Return by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira.
Sara Balabanlilar has been a bookseller, event organizer, undercover gallerist, and co-founder of queer sci-fi bookshop Paraspace Books. She is currently the Marketing & Sales Director at Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive.