Daughters of Latin America: A book talk and poetry reading event – 3.13.25

*Virtual attendees will receive Zoom link the day before the event

Founded in the 1990s, the Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies (LLACS) program at Northeastern returns to the Fall 2024 semester with the “Celebrating 30 Years of LLACS Scholarship: A Book Talk Series”. This speaker series centers Northeastern LLACS faculty discussing their recent publications.

This event will feature authors Sandra Guzmán, Diannely Antigua, María Clara Sharupi Jua, and Yvette Modestin.

Sandra is an award-winning pioneering storyteller, culture writer, literary editor, and documentary filmmaker whose work reclaims and centers narratives of people and communities outside the margins. Her work explores identity, land, memory, race, sexuality, spirituality, culture, and gender. A multimedia storyteller, she writes, edits, translates, and produces work that illuminates and educates. Her documentary films have aired on PBS, Netflix, HBO, HULU and Prime. Her stories have appeared on NBC News, Gannett | USA Today, shondaland among others. Her opinion pieces on NBC Think, CNN, and Latino Rebels. She was a producer of The Pieces I Am, a critically acclaimed film about the art and life of her literary mentor Toni Morrison. She is the author of the non-fiction feminist book, The New Latina’s Bible and editor of LATINA and Heart & Soul magazines. Her essays have appeared in Audubon magazine and the anthologies, So We Can Know edited by Aracelis Girmay and Some of My Best Friends edited by Emily Bernard. She won an Emmy Award for a special program unpacking the U.S. embargo against Cuba while she worked as a producer at Telemundo. She is an Afro-Indigenous daughter of the Caribbean born in the archipelago of Borikén.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she served as the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.

María Clara Sharupi Jua (b. 1964) is a Shuar poet, essayist, singer, and Indigenous and human rights activist, born and raised in Sevilla Don Bosco, in the Ecuadorean Amazon forest. She writes in Shuar and Spanish, and served on a team who translated the Ecuador Constitution into Shuar. She has coauthored seven books and authored the short story collection Tarimiat. She also is the director of the Tarimiat Cultura Amazónica Shuar. The Shuar nation includes more than eighty thousand people who live in Ecuador. “Star Women Yaá Numa” (“Mujeres estrellas Yaá Nuwa”) was translated from Spanish by Sandra Guzmán.

Yvette Modestin (Lepolata Apoukissi) (b. 1969) is a writer, activist, poet, and storyteller, born and raised in Colón, Panama. She is a coeditor of the anthology Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora and a contributor to The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Her work also appears in Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas. She is a contributor to the essay collection The Trayvon Martin in US: An American Tragedy as well as the anthologies Psychological Health of Women of Color, Rapsodia Antillana, and Antología de la poesía colonense 1900-2012. Her poetry book Nubian Butterfly: The Transformation of a Soulful Heart was published in Panama in 2019.

We will be celebrating their most recently published book, Daughters of Latin America. This dazzling book brings together 140 voices from around the world. Brilliant writers who have achieved acclaim, are on the rise, and women who have been underappreciated, erased, and forgotten. These Daughters skillfully express themselves through poetry, speeches, letters, essays, drama, memoirs, humor, short stories, songs, chants, diaries, and novels. They are well-known and beloved writers, fresh and vibrant voices from Chicago to São Paulo, from Loíza to Montevideo, from Portsmouth to Port-auPrince, from the Bronx to Havana, from Chiapas to Pointe-à-Pitre celebrating a heritage that unites them.

Please join us for this highly relevant and important discussion, as well as a ¡CELEBRACIÓN! of this compelling book.