Ecopoetry with Urayoán Noel and Sarah Giragosian

Join us for a conversation about “Ecopoetics” with poets whose works often explore our relationship with Nature.

Urayoán Noel, former UAlbany faculty member, is a Puerto Rican poet, performer, translator, and preeminent scholar of Nuyorican poetry. His most recent work of translation is Adjacent Islands (2022) by eco-feminist poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado, inspired by her camping trips throughout the Puerto Rican archipelago.

Noel’s most recent collection is Transversal, a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. Written in Spanish and English, and featuring bold experiments in “self-translation,” Transversal was longlisted for the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award. His 2014 book, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, is the first book-length study of Nuyorican poetry, and the definitive book on the subject.

Born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel’s other books include the performance text EnUncIAdOr (2014), and the poetry collections Boringkén (2008, named a Book of the Year by El Nuevo Día) and Hi-Density Politics (2010, a National Books Critics Circle Small Press Highlights selection). Noel lives in the Bronx and teaches at New York University, where he serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish. A board member of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, Noel is a founding member of The Latinx Project at NYU, as well as Editor-in-Chief of its online publication Intervenxions.

Sarah Giragosian, poet and lecturer in the UAlbany Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI), is the author of a new collection, Mother Octopus (2024), co-winner of the 2023 Halcyon Prize. The book features poems that raise questions about the nature of human and animal appetites, and rising levels of material consumption that threaten the natural environment, while also exploring queer forms of intimacy and resilience.

Her previous collections include Queer Fish (2017), winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and The Death Spiral (2020). Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others.

We published a Q&A with Giragosian on April 13, 2020, during the early months of the COVID lockdown. https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/post/catching-up-with-poet-sarah-giragosian