The Unamuno Author Festival 2019 will celebrate the growing community of US and UK anglophone and Latinx poetry around Desperate Literature bookshop in association with the Unamuno Author Series with one week of readings and lectures from fifty poets and non-fiction writers (list below). As part of the festival we are also collaborating with the Latinx Writers Caucus to launch the Garcia Lorca prize for an emerging Latinx author (more information below).  

And if you're reading this then you know that we need your help to fund it!

The Unamuno Author Series is a literary series that began in 2014 with Richard Blanco reading in the courtyard of the Catedral de Redentor in Madrid by invitation from the poet and episcopal priest Spencer Reece. The aim of the project is to foster a community of poets in the heart of Spain with a focus upon cross-cultural poetic communication and the relationship between poetry and spirituality. They joined with Desperate Literature in 2016 and now function as a group of ten wonderful, poetic folks with experience in everything from bookselling, editing, events management and corporate branding. Full biographies can be found here.

Spencer Reece is the founder of the Unamuno Author Series, a poet and an episcopal priest living in Madrid, Spain. Reece’s debut collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was chosen for the Bakeless Poetry Prize by Louise Glück and adapted into a short film by director James Franco. He is also the author of the collection The Road to Emmaus (2013), which was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award. His writing honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Council, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award. The Wylie Agency is representing The Little Entrance: Devotions, a forthcoming autobiography.

Desperate Literature is an international bookshop dedicated to creating a community around literature in English, Spanish and French. They run a literary prize for short, experimental fiction, and are soon to publish a bilingual book of peripheral literatures about/from Madrid. Co-owner Terry Cravenbrought the bookshop together with the Unamuno Author Series with the aim of furthering their mutual aim of literary community building. 

As part of our commitment to building a community anglophone/latinx poetry, we are proud to be collaborating with the Latinx Writers Caucus to launch the García Lorca Prize for an emerging Latinx writer, judged by Ruben Quesada. 

We are very lucky to be collaborating with the following groups and associations, whether to promote poets, aid travelling writers or to spread the word of our growing community:

The American Poetry Review   Farrar Straus Giroux  
The Civitella Ranieri Foundation    The Paris Review    The Rizoma Festival  La Residencia de Estudiantes
La Fundación Federico García Lorca    Salmagundi Magazine  Instituto Internacional Americano . 

Our budget is broken down into three principle categories.

Initial BENCHMARK: $8500
Funding all the festival necessities, the publishing of the festival anthology, and ensuring the future viability of the community around the Unamuno Author Series.

Necessities include everything from the promotional video, publicity (posters, bookmarks, online promotion) and a new sound system for the festival (and to record all festival and future Unamuno Author Series readings), along with five-hundred copies of the actual anthology (editing, design, layout and printing). 

Extended BENCHMARK: $20,500
Aiding twelve poets to get over from the USA and UK (biographies below)

Total GOAL: $23,500
We are working with the University of North Carolina to bring over MFA student Lashaun Noel to help with organisation, editing the anthology and organising the day-to-day running of the festival as well as hoping to bring over festival friends Dar Williams and Lila Blue for a closing concert at the Instituto Internacional here in Madrid.

We are so excited to be working with such an amazing group of poets. Check them out:

Carolyn Forché    Michael Collier    Francisco Aragón    Carl Adamshick     Rick Barot    Henri Cole    Rigoberto González    David Biespiel    Campbell McGrath    Michael White    Page Hill Starzinger    Elena Penga    Jeremy Voigt     Anne Waldman   Luis Rodríguez    Tómas Morin    Kathleen Flenniken    Scott Cunningham    Gregory Pardlo    Mario Chard    Noah Warren   Travis Helms    Richard Blanco        Joanne Diaz    Fiona Sze-Lorrain    Mary Moore Easter    Mark Conway    Marjorie Kanter    Jenny Johnson    Shara Lessley    Sharon Olds  Martha Serpas    Naomi Mulvihill    Michael Dumanis    Su Smallen    Richard Scott    Pádraig O´Tuama    Barney Bush    John Koethe    Rafael Carvajal    Ruben Quesada    Octavio Quintanilla     Forrest Gander    Rolando Perez    David Baker    Bruce Snider   Joseph Fasano    Maya Zeller    Kit Fan    Aracelis Girmay    Sheila Maldonado    Layla Benitez-James    Dana Gioia    Caitriona O'Rielly  Patricia Smith  Peg Boyers  Robert Boyers  &  more...

The Unamuno Author Series Festival aims to bring together poets both well-known and emerging, fostering a sense of community around that mixture. As such, in the list bellow you'll find names you know and names you might not know, but trust us, they're all amazing.

If you would like to aid a poet in particular when you donate*, please use the "Donation Attribution" section to select "this is a memorial or special occasion gift" where you may enter your comments.

*Please note, while we take your preferences into strong consideration we are not able, following the Fractures Atlas guidelines, to promise that funds will be allocated 100% according to donor preference.

THE POETS:

Carl Adamshick was born in Toledo, Ohio, raised in Harvard, Illinois, and has called Portland home since 1991. He is the author of the poetry collection Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the OregonBook Award. He has taught creative writing at The Catlin Gabel School, and is the William Stafford Archive Writer-in-Residence at Lewis & Clark College. Recently, he held the position of Visiting Writer at the American International School in Vienna, Austria. He has received a grant from Literary Arts, Inc., and his poetry has been included as part of Poetry-in-Motion, a nationwide arts project that brings together poetry advocacy and public transportation. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Narrative, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Tin House, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Poet, Guernica, and ZYZZYVA. Currently, he is translating Somersault from the Hebrew of Dan Pagis. His Books include Saint Friend, Receipt, and a forthcoming collection of poetry called Birches. He lives in Portland, Oregon where he is editor of Tavern Books, a non-profit poetry press dedicated to books and book culture.

Nico Amador is a poet whose work   explore  various  histories—real  and  imagined,   personal  and  generational—in  an  attempt  to  reconcile  the  contradictions   embedded  in  his  experience  as  a  trans,  queer,  and  mixed  race  Latinx.  His poems have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Poet Lore, Bedfellows, Plenitude, Nimrod International Journal, APIARY Magazine, and are forthcoming in Bettering American Poetry, Vol. 3.  His chapbook, Flower Wars, was selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press in 2017.   He is an alumni of The Home School and the Lambda Literary Foundation's Writers Retreat, serves as poetry editor at Thread Makes Blanket Press and helped to co-found the Rogue Writing Workshop of Philadelphia, which provides workshop instruction with accomplished poets to those writing and learning outside of academic institutions.  Nico currently works as a grassroots organizer for the ACLU, focused on issues of decarceration and racial justice.

Ann Benoit is working as a Certified Peer Specialist for the Center for Human Development, in Holyoke, MA.  She lives with her son in Springfield, MA, where she was born and raised. She attended Western New England University right out of high school and her inclusion in the Unamuno Author Series Festival will be her first published poem.

Poet Barney Bush is a citizen of the Vinyard Indian Settlement currently seeking recognition in the state of Illinois. They are in need of an elder living center, a child daycare and a drug rehabilitation center. He is currently working on a manuscript of poems for friends who have died tragically over the past three decades.

Naomi Mulvihill was a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her poems have been published in a variety of journals including the New Orleans Review, Green Mountains Review and West Branch. Her essays have been published in The Harvard Educational Review and The Writer’s Chronicle. She works as a bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools where she has been awarded Boston Teacher of the Year and USA Today Teacher of the Year for her work children and their families in the early elementary grades.

Caitríona O’Reilly is from Ireland and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she completed a Ph.D. in American Literature. She has published three full collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books: The Nowhere Birds (2001), The Sea Cabinet (2006), and Geis (2015). She writes a regular poetry column for the Irish Times and lives in Lincolnshire.

Elena Penga is a dynamic Greek playwright who also writes flash fiction.  She writes so well about the political in the everyday and the impact of large events on the individual.  She has three books of short fiction and nine books of plays plus her work has been translated in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch.  Her collection Tight Belts And Other Skin received the distinguished  Ourani Award of the Greek Academy of Letters. Her story 'The Untrodden' was the official entry for Greece in the volume of Best European Fiction 2017 published by Dalkey Press, USA.

Ruben Quesada is a contributing editor at Chicago Review of Books. He serves as faculty at Northwestern University and at The School of the Art Institute where he teaches poetry writing. His chapbook of poetry and translations, Revelations, is available from Sibling Rivalry Press and he founded the Latinx Writers Caucus.

Luis J. Rodríguez has 15 books of poetry, children's literature, fiction, and nonfiction--his bestselling memoir, Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., is one of the most checked out books in libraries ... and one of the most stolen. He is the founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and co-founder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. From 2014 to 2016, Luis served as Los Angeles' official Poet Laureate.

Richard Scott was born in London in 1981. His pamphlet 'Wound' (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem 'crocodile' won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho (Faber & Faber) is his first book and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018.

Jeremy Voigt’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Post Road, Willow Springs, Fifth Wednesday Journal, BPJ, and other magazines. His chapbook was featured on the Writer’s Almanac. He lives, writes, reads, parents, runs, and lives by a large lake in western Washington.

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We are also working with the University of North Carolina to bring over an MFA intern to work with the editing of our anthology, aiding with the organisation during the festival and liaising with poets for delivery of the campaign rewards.

Lashaun Noel. I’m originally from Brooklyn NYC and I carry a love for writing that extends beyond, it being something that I use to escape. I am a first year in the Creative writing MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Willington. Prior to attending UNCW I was an undergraduate at the University of Tampa and after graduation I was a preschool teacher for a year. I am very excited to have been given the opportunity to volunteer for the Unamuno festival and will help in any way that I can.