Join us for an evening of reading and conversation with Cristina Pérez Díaz and Isabel Sobral Campos celebrating their new poetry books. Puerto Rican writer and translator Cristina Pérez Díaz’s debut poetry collection From the Founding of the Country (Winter Editions) and poet and translator Isabel Sobral Campos’s award-winning The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation (Futurepoem) are two extraordinary book-length poems which confront violent colonial histories. The poets will read from their new books, followed by a conversation moderated by Lost & Found Fellow Coco Sofia Fitterman. Books will be available at the event. Free and open to all, please register to attend.

About the Poets:

Cristina Pérez Díaz is a Puerto Rican writer and translator. Her translation of José Watanabe’s ‘Antígona’ won the 2023 ASTR Translation Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in , , and . She has published two chapbooks of poetry in Spanish: Adentro crían pájaros (Parawa) and Nueva anatomía imaginaria (La impresora). Haunted by the violent legacies of colonialism on both landscape and bodies, her first book deliriously dreams with the foundation of a country from the bed of two lovers. has garnered praise from Mara Pastor, Chloe García Roberts, Phoebe Giannisi, Margarita Pintado Burgos, and Isabel Sobral Campos, who writes “Pérez Díaz’s dazzling poem stretches the borders between languages and histories, unearthing a chasm that challenges the colonial forces behind its eruption.”

Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation, selected for the Futurepoem 2023 Other Futures Award, as well as two other full-length poetry books, How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks, and her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Black Sun Lit, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her poems have also been included in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Spuyten Duyvil). In 2024, her collaborative translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She co-founded and edits Sputnik & Fizzle press with her sister and lives in Cambridge, MA.