Marta Aponte Alsina (Keynote Speaker) is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic. She has published the novels Angélica furiosa (1994), El cuarto rey mago (1996), Vampiresas (2004), Sexto sueño (2007, National Novel Award of the Pen Club of Puerto Rico), El fantasma de las cosas (2009), Sobre mi cadáver (2012) and Mr. Green (2013). Green (2013); the books of short stories La casa de la loca (2001) and Fúgate (2005); and the essays “Somos islas” (2015) and “PR3 Aguirre” (2018), among many others. She is the editor of numerous books and magazines, including the anthology Narraciones puertorriqueñas published by Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho. In 2014, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Puerto Rico awarded her the Nilita Vientós Gastón Chair.
Julio Marzán (Keynote Speaker and Roundtable Panelist) was born in Puerto Rico and at the age of four months was taken to New York. He has a B.A. in English from Fordham University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Linguistics from New York University. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of English at Nassau Community College. In Spring 2007, he was a Visiting Associate Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University. As poet he has won the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center “Discovery” Award and The New School’s Dylan Thomas Award. His poems have appeared, among others, in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Tin House, 3 Quarks Daily, and Harper’s Magazine, and selections in numerous college texts, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. He has published two books of poetry in English, Translations without Originals and most recently The Glue Trap and Other Poems, and in Spanish Puerta de Tierra. His translations of the poems of Luis Palés Matos were published as Selected Poems/Poesía Selecta: Luis Palés Matos. From 2004–2007 he was Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. In nonfiction, he has published The Numinous Site: The Poetry of Luis Palés Matos, Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish, Latin American, and Latino Literature, and The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams. His most recent nonfiction is The Labyrinth of Multitude and Other Reality Checks on Being Latino/x. As novelist he has published The Bonjour Gene and Don’t Let Me Die in Disneyland: The 3-D Life of Eddie Loperena.
María del Pilar Blanco (Presenter) is Professor of Spanish American and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where she is also Fellow and Tutor in Spanish at Trinity College. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (2012), and editor of several collections: Popular Ghosts: with Esther Peeren, The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010) and The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Critical Theory (2013), and with Joanna Page, Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (2020). Her essay “Lyrical Mobilities: William Carlos Williams and Julia de Burgos in the Latinx Grain” is forthcoming in Marissa López and John Alba Cutler’s Latinx Literary Modernities, 1848-1992, to be published by Cambridge University Press. She is currently completing a project entitled Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Latin America, 1870-1920 (with Oxford University Press) and is starting research on a project entitled The Weak Child, a historical look at babies, children, and disability in the Spanish Caribbean after the US invasion of 1898.
María del Carmen Quintero Aguiló (Presenter) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. She holds a PhD in Caribbean Literature with a focus on the poetry of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Her work has appeared in various joint publications from the University of the Netherlands Antilles, the University of the West Indies (UWI), and the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, as well as Caribbean Studies Journal, The CEA Critic (Johns Hopkins University Press- JHUP), and Purdue University. She is the chief editor of the book, Caribbean Without Borders: Beyond the Can[n]on’s Range (Cambridge Scholars Press 2016), and the recipient of the Karen Lentz Madison Award for Scholarship.
Peter Ramos (Presenter and Moderator) is the author of Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge, 2019) in which he examines the ways that U.S. and Latin American modernist canons have been in cross-cultural, mutually enabling conversation, especially through the act of literary translation. He also has criticism in College Literature, The Faulkner Journal, The CEA Critic, Mandorla, Pleiades, and MELUS. His poetry has been published in Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), and other journals. Nominated ten times for a PushcartPrize, Peter is the author of two books of poetry, Lord Baltimore (Ravenna Press, 2020) and Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), as well as three chapbooks: Television Snow (Back Pages Books 2015), Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). A Professor of English at Buffalo State University, Peter teaches courses in American literature and, occasionally, creative writing.
Jonathan Cohen (Presenter and Moderator and Facilitator) is a widely published poet, translator of Latin American poetry, essayist, and scholar of inter-American literature. He is the editor of the only collection of William Carlos Williams’s translations of Spanish-language poetry, By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959, and editor of the centennial edition of Williams’s Al Que Quiere!, both published by New Directions; as well as the editor of Williams’s translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella by Pedro Espinosa, The Dog and the Fever (Wesleyan). His translations include Ernesto Cardenal’s Pluriverse (New Directions), From Nicaragua, with Love (City Lights), and With Walker in Nicaragua (Wesleyan); Enrique Lihn’s The Dark Room (New Directions); Roque Dalton’s Small Hours of the Night (Curbstone); and Pedro Mir’s Countersong to Walt Whitman (Peepal Tree), Two Elegies of Hope (Spuyten Duyvil), and Poems of Good Love … and Sometimes Fantasy (Peepal Tree). He is the author of A Pan-American Life (Wisconsin), the only critical biography of Muna Lee, the celebrated poet and feminist (and forgotten first wife of Luis Muñoz Marín). He holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a PhD in English from Stony Brook University. For more information about his work, see his website: jonathancohenweb.com.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera (Presenter and Moderator) is professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez and the founding Director of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Herlihy-Mera has been a faculty member at universities in the US, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and in 2022, he was Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. In 2019, Herlihy-Mera was Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies in Budapest. His books include, Decolonizing American Spanish (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism (Routledge, 2018), Paris in American Literatures (Rowman 2015) and Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism (Rodopi, 2011). His forthcoming book, Academic Imperialism, co-authored with Héctor Huyke, is under contract with the U. Nebraska Press. He has a PhD from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Mark C. Long (Moderator) is professor emeritus of English at Keene State College, the public liberal arts college in the University System of New Hampshire, where he taught courses in the Department of English, the American Studies Program, the Women and Gender Studies Program, the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program, and the college-wide Integrative Studies Program. Mark has published dozens of essays, book chapters, and reviews on American literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and the teaching of writing, and is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2018) and Teaching North American Environmental Literature (2008). His most recent projects include an essay on methods of reading, “Close Reading at the End of Time,” and a study of William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder (in a special issue of in the William Carlos Williams Review that he guest edited on Williams, Modernism, and West Coast Culture). In 2021 he completed an open-access digital concordance to the poems of William Carlos Williams (that he built with his son Nathaniel), and is currently co-editing a collection of essays on teaching the poetry and prose of William Carlos Williams. A former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), Mark is the current president of the William Carlos Williams Society.
Linda M. Rodriguez (Moderator) was born in Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, and spent the later part of her childhood in Ponce, a city steeped in Caribbean and Spanish colonial traditions on the southern coast of the island. She completed her B.A. at Georgetown University where she studied British and Spanish literature and visual arts. As a fellowship recipient, she completed graduate degrees at The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with two major research projects: Historical Narratives in the Caribbean: Women Giving Voice to History and Don Quixote’s Influence on the British Drama of the 17th and 18th Centuries. In addition, in 2015 she graduated from the Professional Program in Screenwriting at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Her creative work has appeared in: Dismantle (Thread Makes Blanket Press, 2014, introduction by Junot Diaz), Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose & Essays (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), Journal of Caribbean Literatures (Vol 5.3 (2008) University of Central Arkansas), and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003). Her novella, The Galician, was awarded a Raymond Carver Best Story Award in 2006 by Carve Magazine, her story, First Memory, was awarded in 2011 a Family Matters Honorable Mention by Glimmer Train, and in 2013 her poem, The Coconut Man, was awarded the David Hough Literary Prize by the University of the Virgin Island’s magazine The Caribbean Writer. Her most recent project is an eco-feminist re-interpretation of Eugenio María de Hostos 19th century autobiographical short story, En barco de papel. At present she is a professor of creative writing, Caribbean literature and film in the English Department, University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.
Daniel E. Burke (Moderator) is an Associate Professor at Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago where he teaches writing and literature. Daniel wrote his dissertation on ecopoetics in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and has served the William Carlos Williams Society in various roles for more than a decade, most recently as Immediate Past President. During his time in the Society he has been gratified to be adjacent to projects such as the development of their website, the creation of a digital concordance of Williams’s poetry, and currently as a co-editor (with Mark C. Long and Elin Käck) of an upcoming volume with the MLA, Approaches to Teaching the Poetry and Prose of William Carlos Williams. His other research interests include Chicago literature, ecopoetics, and Ignatian/Jesuit and culturally-competent pedagogies.
Ian Copestake (Moderator) is editor of the William Carlos Williams Review and author of The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry (Camden House, 2009). Based in Frankfurt am Main, he conducts research as an independent scholar and works freelance as an academic editor.
Stephen Hahn (Moderator) is professor emeritus of English, William Paterson University. His recent publications include “William Carlos Williams and the Subject of Aging,” William Carlos Williams Review.42:2 (2023), and “Literature and the Cultural Scripting of Aging and Dying” (Aging Studies and Ecocriticism, Balestrini et al, eds., 2023). He recently participated in the conference on Williams and Levertov in Madrid, Spain, presenting a paper in “Craft as Resistance” in their work.
Ivette Romero (Moderator) is a Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she is founder of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. She has taught a variety of courses in language studies (French and Spanish); Latin American cinema; and Caribbean, Latin American, and Francophone literature. She holds a BA in French Language and Literature (from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez) and a PhD in French Literature/Romance Studies (Cornell University). Her research interests focus on the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class and national identity in the visual arts in Latin America and the broader Caribbean. She is co-editor of two volumes of critical essays—Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures (2008)—and the Repeating Islands blog. (https://repeatingislands.com/)
