Thursday, April 11, 2024
The Juanita Tobin Memorial Reading
Craft Talk: 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Table Rock, Room 201B, Plemmons Student Union
Reading: 6 p.m.
Table Rock, Room 201B, Plemmons Student Union
About M. Soledad Caballero
M. Soledad Caballero, Professor of English & co-chair of the Women's Gender and Sexuality Program at Allegheny College, is a Macondo and CantoMundo fellow. Her poem “Some Day I Will Visit Hawk Mountain" was featured in May 2022 in the On Being Poetry Unbound podcast, hosted and read by Pádraig Ó Tuamaby. She was a 2022 finalist for the Iron Horse Review’s National Poetry Month Issue and winner of the 2019 winner of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts Joy Harjo poetry prize. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, and other venues. I Was a Bell (2021, Red Hen Press) won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry contest. I Was a Bell was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year, and was a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. Her second collection, tentatively titled Flight Plan, is also forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She received her undergraduate degree from Appalachian State’s Department of English.
Visit her website: msoledadcaballero.com
Praise for I Was a Bell:
“A triumph, a gutting cry of love and longing for all that migration sows and uproots in the survivors of exile. In retracing her family’s story of leaving a Chile under Pinochet to 1980s Oklahoma, Soledad Caballero gives soaring voice to the ways history, memory, and the collective weight of our disappeared live silenced, but never unheard, in our bodies and hearts. It’s hard to express how much these poems made unnamed parts of me feel seen.” — Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home and Chasing the Sun
“Caballero bears unflinching witness to the emotional trauma inherited from war-ravaged Chile to the exiled plains of Oklahoma. As though to witness is to love. These poems negotiate the transitions of language, memory, country, her battle with cancer, counterbalancing the violence from which she fled, with a transformative devotion to details.” — Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet
“Caballero explores memory, war in Chile, and immigration to the U.S. in a deeply personal and touching way.” — Latino Stories, “2021 Top 10 ‘New’ Latino Latinx Authors You, Your Family, and Teachers Need To Read”