Unamuno Author Series Festival: Poetry Reading with the Civitella Ranieri Foundation

Join us for a live poetry reading in celebration of the Unamuno Author Festival, founded by Spencer Reece and organized in collaboration with Desperate Literature and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. During the event, poets and alumni of Civitella Ranieria will read pieces in celebration of the Foundation's 25^th year of providing a safe haven for artists, writers and composers.

Dashboard 1:  

Jericho Brown, Tom Healy, Monica Ferrell, Mark Wunderlich, Monica Youn

Dashboard 2:

Molly McCully Brown, Michael Dumanis, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Patrick Rosal

Civitella Ranieri Foundation is a residency program for international writers, composers, and visual artists located in a 15th century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy. Since its founding by Ursula Corning in 1995, the Center has hosted almost 1000 Fellows and Director's Guests coming from more than 100 countries. The Foundation enables its Fellows to pursue their work and to exchange ideas in a unique and inspiring setting.

About the Unamuno Author Festival:

The Unamuno Author Festival began by accident on March 27, 2012, the day American poet, Adrienne Rich died. Founder, poet and Episcopal priest, Spencer Reece, held what was intended to be a “one-off” reading on the patio of the Redentor Cathedral to cheer up his friend of him, Cuban-American poet, Richard Blanco, who was despairing over poetry's diminishing readership. Have people attended. Unbeknownst to all, in less than a year Richard Blanco would be reading to millions of people for the second inauguration of Barack Obama.

And yet, while the Unamuno Author Series unknowingly began that day between Blanco and Reece, its spirit originates in a much older relationship between a priest and a poet connected to the very same church community.

In the 1930s, the esteemed and famously heterodox Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno befriended the only protestant minister in the city of Salamanca, Rev. Atilano Coco. They wrote letters to each other, and Unamuno occasionally attended services at Rev. Coco's church. Their friendship endured as Spanish society teetered on the brink of civil war, divided between opposing ideological forces. But it came to a tragic end with the Fascist military uprising in the summer of 1936, during which Coco was arrested and shot dead in a firing squad. Unamuno died shortly afterward of a heart attack while under house arrest ordered by the Fascists.

Our series echoes at its core friendship and the enduring bond between poetry and the human spirit that Coco and Unamuno shared years ago. Today our series has grown into a team of 14 volunteers who are building this bond into an ever-expanding, borderless poetry community with its heart in Madrid. This years festival will bring over 60 poets to Madrid during a week-long festival organized in conjunction with Desperate Literature and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

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