Book Night: Celebration of Louise Glück, Nobel Prize for Literature 2020
Celebration of the American poet Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Readers: Students of Aquinas American School — Madrid.
On the occasion of the celebration of the Night of the Books 2020, Aquinas American School students present a selection of poems by Louise Glück in collaboration with American Space Madrid. The reading (in English) is facilitated by the American poet Layla Benitez-James, who lives in Alicante. Benitez-James contextualizes the reading with a presentation of the figure of Louise Glück.
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Louise glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Considered by many to be one of America's most talented contemporary poets, Glück is known for her poetry's technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. the poet Robert Hass you have called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” In 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Layla Benitez-James is a translator, editor, and poet living in Alicante whose poems and translations have appeared in The Accents Review, PoetryLondon, London Magazine, Guernica, Waxwing, Kokoro Magazine, The Galla Science, and elsewhere. Her audio essays about translation can be found at Asymptote Journal Podcast. Her first chapbook of her, God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure was selected by Major Jackson for the Cave Canem 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and published by Jai-Alai Books. She works with the Unamuno Author Series to bring amazing poetry to Madrid.
Anne de la Paz's 12th grade International Baccalaureate students at Aquinas American School have been studying poetry this year.
