Join us for a bilingual reading celebrating Fernando Valverde’s new poetry collection, The Men Who Killed My Mother, translated by Gordon E. McNeer. Fernando Valverde will be reading his poems in Spanish, and Gordon E. McNeer will be reading his translations in English. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: From the first poem in this bilingual edition of The Men Who Killed My Mother, it is evident that the mother in “Our Mother” (“Nuestra Madre”) is not only Fernando Valverde’s. The soulful refrain of “mother/madre” might be anyone’s mother whose suffering is palpable in a world legislated over by men. Issues such as orphanhood, abuse, violence, manipulation, and fear are treated with the rawness of someone who has tasted the venom of betrayal. This is a lyrical dark garden of faith and family, exposing treachery and cruelty, and anger at injustice, from the voice of a son with deep love for his mother—for her honor, dignity, and dreams.
Valverde leads us into a forest full of wolves and serpents under the governance of civil society. He has received many awards for his poetry and is recognized as one of the most highly acclaimed poets of his generation in Spain. This heartfelt English translation by Gordon E. McNeer captures the power of Valverde’s poetic cadences and its haunting evocative lyricism.
About the Author: Fernando Valverde is one of the preeminent poets writing in the Spanish language today, and he has received international acclaim for his contributions to the art of poetry. Before coming to the US, Valverde served as a foreign correspondent for Spain’s major paper, El Pais, covering war zones in the Balkans and the Middle East. In 2014, his book The Insistence of Harm received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute at CUNY. His 2021 bilingual book America was translated by poet Carolyn Forché and published by Copper Canyon Press. In Spanish, Los hombres que mataron a mi madre (Visor) is his most recent book. He has also published La Muerte de Adonais, with the prestigious publishing house Planeta and UNAM, on the life and death of Percy B. Shelley. He has been the director of the International Festival of Poetry in Granada, and he is currently a professor of poetry and Romanticism at the University of Virginia.
About the Translator: Gordon E. McNeer received his doctorate in Romance Languages from Princeton University. He has lived and traveled in Spain and Latin America extensively. Starting with Poetry Facing Uncertainty in 2012, an anthology of poets in the Uncertainty Movement, Dr. McNeer has concentrated on translating, editing, and publishing Spanish and Latin American poets born after 1970. He has translated books of poetry by Federico Díaz Granados, Luis García Montero, Raquel Lanseros, Benjamín Prado, José Sarria, Elvira Sastre, and Fernando Valverde. He is also the author of five books of poetry, Mira lo que has hecho, Los hijos de Bob Dylan, Poems from Walden, God and the Devil, and Poemas mexicanos. He is the director of Valparaíso USA, a bilingual poetry collection in the United States, and president of Valparaíso Editions in Colombia, Spain, and the United States.
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