Grad students, undergrads, faculty, and staff came to SAC 300 on Thursday, September 24, at 3:30pm, for a hybrid critical-creative talk by the award-winning Puerto Rican scholar, poet, translator, and performer Urayoán Noel, who is an associate professor at NYU. Sponsored by the Department of English’s Graduate Colloquium Speaker series, “Bodymind Poetics” drew from Noel's forthcoming monograph Virtually Latinx: Identities in the Age of Social Media, and his in-progress experimental memoir of living with epilepsy, Neural Sea.
Professor Noel presented students with a talk that drew from his diverse interests in academic writing, literary translation, and poetry. He began by discussing the work of poet Pedro Pietri, whom he described as modeling a "radical bodymind freedom." He then read from his upcoming work Virtually Latinx, where he described the presentation of diverse aspects of identity over contemporary social media platforms like tiktok. He went on to read sections from the poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado's work "bioluminiscencia" in Spanish along with his own translation in English. He then read from some of his own poetry, including a piece that drew from fora online such as reddit. Finally, Professor Noel performed an improvisational, multimedia poem, and took questions from the room.
We are grateful to Professor Michael Dowdy for his help in coordinating this visit and to Professor Noel for visiting Villanova. Keep an eye out for additional visitors in the spring!
