Events

Eduardo C. Corral earned degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut collection of poetry, Slow Lightning (2012), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, making him the first Latino recipient of the award. His second collection is Guillotine (2020). Praised for his seamless blending of English and Spanish, tender treatment of history, and careful exploration of sexuality, Corral has received numerous honors and awards, including the Discovery/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A CantoMundo Fellow, he has held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing at Colgate University and was the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. In 2016 he won the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Corral teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in Translation. She is CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 & 2022. Her translation work was recently displayed at “Climate Futurism” an exhibit at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2019 her Poem Maps was part of Pulitzer Prize winning composer Caroline Shaw’s oratorio The Listeners. She recently visited the Library of Congress where she recorded her poems for a special archive that will be held there on Latinx poetry. Her first collection The Pink Box was published by Willow Books in 2015. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body published by Four Way Books was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award among others. She currently teaches poetry at The Juilliard School and lives in Harlem, NY. Find her at www.yeseniamontilla.com