Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, editor and scholar. She writes about people, places, and culture, with a special interest in motions and intersections amongst Americas. She is the translator of book-length collections by Cuban authors Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014 and 2016. Her translation of Morales’s The World as Presence was longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award. Currently she is guest-editing a dossier dedicated to Juan Carlos Flores for The Chicago Review. She is also co-translating and editing Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems, a collection by Álvaro Mutis (Colombia) to be published by New York Review Books. With Kent Johnson, she is co-editor of Materia Prima, an anthology showcasing poetry by Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay) and forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Dykstra held a 2012 Literary Translation Fellowship with the National Endowment of the Arts and received the inaugural 2014 Gulf Coast Prize for Literary Translation. She is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont.
Cubanology
Omar Perez
With an Afterword by the translator, Kristin Dykstra
In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour”...
Fall 2018
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Omar Perez
With an Afterword by the translator, Kristin Dykstra
In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour.” Along with registering common and uncommon vicissitudes of everyday life, the result presents a fusion of languages. Simultaneously national and polycultural, Cubanology streams poetic thought and experience, excerpts from other writings in progress, and the coalescence of a new islandic consciousness – scenes reminiscent of many-minded Odysseus, if home were heart. Visual material appearing throughout Cubanology blends Pérez’s sketches with photographs from that period, as well as art he made after returning to his family home on Havana’s iconic Malécon.
Fall 2018
