During the event we will host on April 23rd, we’ll be presenting the work of three very talented writers: Elaine Vilar, Erik Martinez and Maria del Carmen Silato. Here are details of their productive careers.
Elaine Vilar: a talented Cuban playwright, two times winner of the Garzon Cespedes International Award (Spain, 2012 and 2013) and recipient of the I Accésit Thalía at the Airel ART(E) T(H)EATRO XXI Awards granted by ANTARES Publishing House of Spanish Culture (Canada, 2013). Her book, Alter Medea, will be presented by the Consul General of Cuba in Toronto.
María del Carmen Sillato: born in Argentina, but lives in Canada, where she went into exile in March 1983 after having suffered imprisonment during the latest military dictatorship. She received a PhD from the Univesity of Toronto and is a professor and director of the Translation Plan in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Stiudies at the University of Waterlo. Sillato has done extensive research on the poetry of Juan Gelman, Her book Juan Gelman: Las estrategias de la otredad. Heteronimia, intertextualidad, traducción (Beatriz Viterbo, 1996) received in 1997 the Best Book Award from the Canadian Association of Hispanists. Currently, Sillato is involved in a research project about testimonial writing as a tool for healing trauma. She has published her testimonial narrative Diálogos de amor contra el silencio. Memorias de prisión, sueños de libertad (Alción, 2006)], after a fragment of the book was recognized with the First Prize in the Literary Competition Year 2000: The Historical Memory of Latin American and Caribbean Women. Later she published the anthology Huellas. Memorias de Resistencia (Argentina 1974-1983) (Nueva Editorial Universitaria, 2008)], which is a collection of testimonies in the creative writing style by ex-political prisoners of the state terrorism in Argentina. These two books –Diálogos and Huellas- represent genuine contributions to the reconstruction of the historical memory in Argentina. Sillato has published numerous articles on the poetry of Juan Gelman, testimonial writings, and the presence of Eva Perón in literature. She is the co-editor of the recently published volume Identidades americanas más allá de las fronteras nacionales. Ensayos en homenaje a Keith Ellis (University Press of the South 2012).
Erik Martinez Richards is one of the founding members of London Open Mic Poetry Night. He, Martin Hayter and Stan Burfield drove to a reading in Sarnia in June 2012, a memorial reading for the late Peggy Fletcher, the long-time backbone of the Sarnia poetry comunity. The three Londoners read in the open mic at the end of the reading and on the way back wondered why there was a monthly open mic in Sarnia but none in the much larger city of London. The result was the founding of Poetry Night.
Born in Santiago, Chile (1944), Erik Martinez Richards studied Spanish literature at the Universidad de Chile and participated in the editorial board of “Orfeo” a prestigious poetry journal, together with his friends from the School of Santiago, an active poetry group at the time. After Pinochet’s military coup, he immigrated to Canada in February, 1974. Obtained an M.A. in Spanish from Queen’s University (Kingston), graduating with a dissertation on Altazor, a long poem by Vicente Huidobro, considered one of the greatest achievements of XX Century Latin American poetry.
Ediciones Cordillera published Tequila Sunrise (Ottawa, 1985), a book of poems, and he has been included in several anthologies of Chilean poetry in Canada. He has published translations and poetry in Canadian and international journals. Presently, has just finished writing The Sun Never Sets, his second book of poems, for which he is already looking for a publisher. In 1987, he became an in-house Spanish translator and reviser for the Translation Bureau of Canada. He moved back to London in 2009 where he lives with Violetta, his wife.
Leave a Reply