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In Conversation: M. Soledad Caballero
April 5, 2022 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT
Join the Notebooks Collective for a reading and conversation with poet Soledad Caballero. She will read from her new book, I Was A Bell, winner of the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize. We will discuss memory, displacement, and language.
About the Book
In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present. These poems interweave an early childhood lived in another country and in another language with experiences of immigration and family histories in the United States. They create connections between a child’s naïve perspective of dictatorship and an adult perspective informed by bodily illness and political knowledge. Ultimately, Caballero traces a lineage of memory, exploring how present moments unearth the past that ripples through them. This collection does not reconcile the past and the present. Instead, these poems remind us that how we ask questions about ourselves, our histories, and our bodies is what creates our identities, our traumas, and our future hopes and possibilities.
From Red Hen Press
About M. Soledad Caballero
M. Soledad Caballero is Professor of English and co-chair of the WGSS Program at Allegheny College. She is a Macondo and a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, was winner of the 2019 Joy Harjo poetry contest by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, the Crab Orchard Review, and other venues. Her collection, I Was a Bell, won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, Red Hen Press 2021. She is an avid tv watcher and a terrible birder.