For a PDF version of the program, please click here.

The annual Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature is a joint undertaking of the University of Colorado, Boulder; the University of Kansas, Lawrence; the University of Missouri, Columbia; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Milwaukee; and Washington University in St. Louis. The conference will feature individual presentations and special sessions on aspects of the literatures of Spain or Spanish America written in Spanish or English.

Keynote Speakers:

Martín Espada, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

“The Republic of Poetry: A Reading”

Called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published seventeen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. Two more books are forthcoming: The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), a collection of poems, and The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive (Michigan, 2010), a collection of essays. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008), Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premio Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages; collections of poems have recently been published in Spain, Puerto Rico and Chile. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda. (Website)

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Rutgers University

“Neither vassal nor patriot: filibusterismo and extended colonialism in the archipelagos in the Caribbean and the Philippines”

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is a Professor with a joint appointment with the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature. She has a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, an M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Latin American literary and cultural studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on Colonial Latin American discourses and contemporary Caribbean and Latino narratives, colonial and postcolonial theory, migration, and cultural studies. She is the author of Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1999), Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Ediciones Callejón, 2003) and From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Bucknell, 2008). She edited with Mabel Moraña the compilation of essays “Nictimene sacrílega”: homenaje a Georgina Sabat de Rivers (México: Iberoamericana and Claustro de Sor Juana 2003). She is currently working on a fourth book project, a comparative study on internal Caribbean migrations between former/actual metropolis and colonies that questions transnational and postcolonial approaches to massive population displacements and their cultural productions.

Cristina Moreiras-Menor, University of Michigan

“Militancia y sujeto político”

Cristina Moreiras-Menor received her Ph.D in Spanish Literature from the University of California, Davis. She has taught at several universities as permanent or visiting professor. Currently she is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture and Women’s Studies at The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and specializes in Galician and Spanish Literature, Spanish film, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis. She has published extensively on 19th and 20th century Spanish literature and film. She is the author of Cultura herida: Literatura y cine en la España democrática (Libertarias, 2002), La estela del tiempo: Historicidad e imagen en el cine español contemporáneo (forthcoming in Iberoamericana/Vervuert), and the editor of a monographic issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies entitled “Critical interventions on Violence.” She is currently working on a book on the cultural history of Galicia and the notion of (national) borders.