Poet's Prose and Other Essays

The Poet’s Prose and Other Essays: Race, National Identity, and Diaspora in the Americas offers a wide-ranging compilation of essays, literary commentaries, and reviews that aim to engage New World thought and writing and contribute to a more critically integrative and comprehensively embracing perception of cultural life and production in the New World. This volume underlines the importance of the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American dimension of hemispheric history and experience, and how failure to consider or properly integrate this dimension marks one of the central problems facing Caribbean, Latin American, and Latin@ Studies today.

Bringing together important literary works from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and even Peru, among other locales, the collection is composed of three key sections: the first focuses on three of the region’s iconic figures—José Carlos Mariátegui, Oscar Lewis, Nicolás Guillén—and the impact of their contributions on discourses of culture, race, and national identity; the second centers entirely on Caribbean themes, across both French and Spanish language zones, exploring the creative and intellectual landscape of the region as a whole; and the final section addresses the unique features and textures of the experience of Latin@ communities in the United States, beginning with a review of New York as modern embodiment of an authentically "Hemispheric City."

Roberto Márquez is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College. He is a graduate of Brandeis University, and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. An accomplished translator of Latin American poets and writers, Márquez is a recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Centennial Commemorative Medal in recognition of his "outstanding contributions" as translator and scholar of that poet’s work. He is Editor of the bilingual collection Latin American Revolutionary Poetry, and is also the editor-translator of Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times. The first collection of its kind, with the broadest historical scope yet available in English, it was awarded the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) 2008 Prize for Translation. He is Founder-Editor of Caliban: A Journal of New World Thought and Writing (1975-1981), and his most recent volume, A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, was published in the fall of 2010 to a positive critical reception. He has traveled, lived, studied, and worked in various parts of Spain, South America and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, Brazil, Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua.