Featured Scholar - September 2021

 

What are you watching/streaming?
Not really watching anything or streaming anything

What games are you playing?
Not playing any games either

What are you listening to?
Because I'm in Europe I can't listen to my normal Pandora playlists, so I've been making new ones on Spotify. I've got strange (maybe?) tastes in music: if I'm writing or translating I usually listen to music in a language I don't understand, Vieux Farka Touré and Malouma, for example or some Electronica or House, depending on where I'm at with the project. At other times I listen to a range of Americana, blues and jazz and international artists. I'm listening to David Byrne's American Utopia and Mattiel and Headless Heroes right now, but Manu Chao almost always comes in, as well as Milt Jackson and deadmau5.

What are you reading?
In addition to the daily newspaper El País, which I walk to the center of the town where I'm living to buy every morning, I have too many books going at once, I think, but I kind of like it that way. 

• • Jorge Gimeno, a Spanish poet I've translated in the past, just came out with a new book: Barca que se llama Every;
  • the latest book by María Sánchez, the author I'm writing about for my fellowship, has a new book called Almáciga, which is really helping me write about the book Land of Women... I am translating for Trinity University Press;
  • I'm slowly working my way through Edurne Portela's latest novel Los ojos cerrados;
  • There are a few books in English I've got going, too: There's a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, compiled by Tracy Smith and John Freeman and The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, which I'm reading with my friend Vievee Francis. 

What are you writing/thinking about?
I'm thinking a lot about language and place, loss and longing, power dynamics and social justice. I'm writing two collections of poetry and have several translation projects in the works, so of course I'm always thinking about language. However, the relationship between the language(s) I grew up speaking and that place (rural Iowa) with the language(s) I speak now and the places I inhabit ( academia, Texas, Northern Spain, Southern Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, to name a few) have started to enter into how I write about the world, about family I have lost over the last few years and those who are disappearing, as well as how a large swath of our country, of the world in fact, lives in struggle, silenced and ridiculed.