Poetry: Fifty New Recordings from the PALABRA Archive Now Available

From the Library of Congress:

The Library’s Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations are in full swing, and as it is tradition, the Hispanic Reading Room has released a new batch of fifty PALABRA Archive recordings for online streaming.

The PALABRA Archive, which turned eighty last year, is a collection of audio recordings of 20th and 21st century poets and writers from Luso-Hispanic and U.S. Latino communities reading from their works. The collection now has over 850 recordings and continues to grow with new recordings by contemporary authors. With the fifty audios from this release, close to 545 recordings from this repository will be available digitally, making more than half of the collection available for remote users.

Newly released recordings include Chicana poet and author Ana Castillo, Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and Nancy Morejón, and with author and former President of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch. This session with Morejón is the second that the poet recorded for the PALABRA Archive, the first one being in 1976. In this recent recording, she reads from her latest poetry collection Madrigal para un príncipe negro (Madrigal for a Black Prince), a homage that she wrote for the late George Floyd, and reflects on her long career dedicated to poetry, translation, and Caribbean studies.

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PALABRA has been curated by the Library of Congress Hispanic Reading Room since its founding in 1943 and continues to incorporate voices of contemporary literary figures. Throughout its history, writers such as Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Juan Ramón Jiménez have been recorded for the collection, as well as other noteworthy figures like Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

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Direct to Complete List of Newly Added Recordings

Direct to PALABRA Archive

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