As the Library celebrates the world of words, poetry, and books for National Poetry Month, the Latin American, Caribbean, and European Division joins the festivities by releasing the new batch of unpublished recordings from the PALABRA Archive for online streaming.
The PALABRA Archive is a collection of audio recordings of 20th and 21st century poets and writers from Luso-Hispanic and U.S. Latino communities reading from their works. The collection now has over 850 recordings and continues to grow with new recordings by contemporary authors. With the fifty audios from this release, close to 600 recordings from this repository will be available digitally, making more than half of the collection available for remote users.
This new group of published recordings includes the voices of towering 20th century literary figures such as Spanish poet Carmen Conde (1907-1996), Catalan playwright Eduardo Marquina (1979-1946), Brazilian author Ivan Ângelo (1936- ), Mexican writer Fernando del Paso (1935-2018); and contemporary figures such as Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi, Costa Rican writer Daniel Quirós, and award-winning Argentine writer Selva Almada, the latter considered one of the most powerful voices in Argentine and Latin American literature and the most influential feminist of the region.
From the Caribbean, new voices include the poets Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930-2019), and Roberto Valero (1955-1994), as well as Dominican writer and poet Fredy Gatón Arce (1920-1994), and philologist, lawyer, and poet Lupo Hernández Rueda.
In addition, this release includes a number of unique recordings that were done as part of a recent collaboration between the Library’s Hispanic Reading Room and Letras Latinas (the Literary Program at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame) highlighting Afro-Latino poets in the United States. The initiative made possible the recording of a group of six U.S.-Latino poets of African descent, four of whom are part of this newly released group: Afro-Boricua poet Raina León, Dominican-American poet Jasminne Mendez, Panamanian-American poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and Afro-Latina poet Yesenia Montilla.
Click here to see the complete list of newly available recordings. We hope you enjoy our new digital treasures!
PALABRA has been curated by the Library of Congress Hispanic Reading Room since its founding in 1943 and continues to add the voices of contemporary literary figures. Throughout its history, writers such as Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Juan Ramón Jiménez have been recorded for the collection, as well as other noteworthy figures like Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar.
Comments (2)
As a formrr curator of the Palabra Archive for many years, want to congratulate here Catalina Gomez for the brilliant job she is doing by putting the recordings online. She is also adding recordings by important writers to this unique archive.
Writers in the Palabra Atvhive are from the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula.
Thank you your comment, Georgette. We agree! The Archive continues to thrive under her leadership!