The Cuban poet, writer and academic Jamila Medina Ríos will be one of the participants in the Aruba International Poetry Encounter, which will take place between May 8 and 18, according to its organizers.
The event will begin on the 9th at the National Archaeological Museum of Aruba, a beautiful building, formerly the home of the Ecury family, whose history is considered important and representative for the Caribbean.
Precisely, Medina Ríos has collaborated with the Arubian-Argentine writer Arturo Desimone in the first versions in Spanish of the Arubian poetess and artist Nydia Ecury (Aruba 1926-Curaçao 2012).
These are poems by Ecury incorporated into the book Bos di Sanger (Voices of the Blood), originally written in Papiamento, the language of Aruba and Curaçao.
Within the framework of the meeting, various Ibero-American poets (from Chile and Puerto Rico among other nationalities) will recite some of these translations.
The first Spanish-Papiamento bilingual anthology with contemporary poets from the Netherlands Antilles will also be discussed: Thunder from the Dutch Caribbean: a viewpoint to the poetry of Aruba and Curaçaoprepared by the editorial Amargord and in charge of Desimone and Medina Ríos.
Medina Ríos received the Nicolas Guillén award in 2017 for his collection of poems Siguaraya Country and currently resides in the United States, Rhode Island, where he conducts research at Brown University on Cuban exile literature.
The poets will explore the island and the ideas of poetry, the avant-garde, the present and future of minority languages; not only what is spoken in Aruba, but also Portuñol, the language in which the poet and translator Wilson Alves Bezerra from Brazil writes.
Other participants will be the Peruvian editor and poet John Martínez Gonzalez, the Scottish-Mexican Juana Adcock and the Puerto Rican poet Marta Jazmín García.
This will be the first literary gathering of its kind in Aruba and has the support of spaces such as the Prince Bernhard Caribbean Region Culture Fund, UNOCA of Aruba, and the Letters Fund of the Netherlands.
