Award-winning Venezuelan poet Oriette D’Angelo and award-winning poet and translator Lupita Eyde-Tucker will visit Illinois State University on Thursday, September 19, to discuss D’Angelo’s poetry collection Homeland of Swarms (co•im•press, 2024) followed by a bilingual reading from the book.
Translated from the Spanish by Eyde-Tucker, Homeland of Swarms is D’Angelo’s debut collection in English. The author and translator team will take part in Pub.Unit Presents, an event series hosted by the Publications Unit in the Department of English that is centered on embracing the interdisciplinary English studies model of the English department by bringing in writers who are also editors, and who often embody additional literary and educational roles.
The event will be held on Thursday, September 19, at University Galleries. At 4 p.m., there will be a public conversation and question-and-answer session, in which D’Angelo and Eyde-Tucker will discuss the book, poetry, their respective roles as writer and translator, and the sociopolitical exigencies of Venezuela in addition to their shared experiences as editors and educators, specifically D’Angelo’s role as founder of an independent digital literary magazine and Eyde-Tucker’s as a Bread Loaf translation scholar.
The second half of the event will be a bilingual reading from Homeland of Swarms. Books are available to purchase from the publisher with the option to pick-up at the event. Both events are free and open to the public.
“In this urgent collection, at once political and highly personal, D’Angelo brings together body and country: her own female body and her Venezuelan homeland under the abusive yoke of men like Hugo Chavez.”
–Geoffrey Brock
About Homeland of Swarms
At once image-rich, lyrical, and searingly sociopolitical, Homeland of Swarms (Cardiopatías) is Venezuelan poet Oriette D’Angelo’s debut poetry collection in English, translated from the Spanish by Lupita Eyde-Tucker. In her unrelenting, charged poetry, D’Angelo reveals how the diseases and dis-eases of a fraught state infect not only the body politic but also the individual bodies of the citizenry. While the book weaves a tapestry of pain caused by the ills of corruption, scarcity, crime, inflation, and poverty in contemporary Venezuela, it also ponders how individuals can confound societal cancers or wage a worthy struggle against the afflictions—both real and metaphorical—that emanate from the heart of a country to infect, affect, and scar the populace. And yet, Homeland of Swarms imbues the struggle with a sense of hope and an abiding will to survive despite the odds. Eyde-Tucker specifically sought politically motivated poetry from underrepresented countries like Venezuela, and she renders D’Angelo’s poetry into English with poise and panache. Time and again, Homeland of Swarms blends memory and imagery to draw us into the exigencies and emergencies of contemporary Venezuela and transform us, for, according to D’Angelo, “This book was born from the need to name the pain and the disease from the outside, assuming that the weight of our context affects our bodies.”
About the Author
Oriette D’Angelo is an award-winning Venezuelan poet currently living in Iowa City, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish Literature at the University of Iowa. She is the author of four poetry collections, including En mi boca se abrirá la noche (Libero Editorial, 2023) and Cardiopatías (Monte Ávila Editores, 2016). Homeland of Swarms (co•im•press, 2024), is her debut English collection of poetry, a translation of Cardiopatías. Cardiopatías won a first book prize in Venezuela from Monte Avila Editores. She compiled the book Amanecimos sobre la palabra (Team Poetero Ediciones, 2017) about young Venezuelan poets. She is also the founder and director of the digital Spanish language literary magazine Digo.palabra.txt. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Stephen Lynn Smith Memorial Scholarship for Social Justice from University of Iowa. She has an MA in Digital Media from DePaul University as well as an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa.
About the Translator
Lupita Eyde-Tucker is an award-winning poet and translator. Although born in New Jersey, she was raised in Ecuador, where she took an interest in Spanish language poetry. She is the winner of the 2021 Unbound Emerging Poet Prize and her poetry collection “Eucalyptus” was named a finalist for the Andres Montoya Prize from Letras Latinas. Her work has appeared in Women’s Voices for Change, Yemassee, Rattle, and American Life in Poetry among other publications. Her translations of Oriette D’Angelo have appeared in journals such as Nashville Review, Columbia Review, Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review, Circumference, and the Arkansas International, which nominated her translation “Knee on Dirt” for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida and has served as a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Translators Conference since 2021.
The event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation; the Illinois State University Foundation Fund; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the Publications Unit in the Department of English.
For additional information, contact Holms Troelstrup, assistant director of the Publications Unit, at jhtroel@IllinoisState.edu or (309) 438-3025. Follow the Publications Unit on Twitter @PubUnit_ISU and on Instagram @PubUnit.
