Chilean poet Raúl Zurita reads at the Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce that Raúl Zurita, one of Latin America’s most celebrated and controversial poets, will read as part of the organization’s Poetry Off the Shelf series.

What:
Harriet Reading Series: Raúl Zurita

When:
Tuesday, September 27, 7 p.m.

Where:
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street

Zurita was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature and a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and he has held poetry readings at numerous American universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley. His books in English translation include Anteparadise, Purgatory, INRI, and Song for His Disappeared Love.

After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 US-supported military coup that ousted Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, Zurita’s poetry sought to register the violence and atrocities committed against the Chilean people and the corruption of the Spanish language. During the dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990, Zurita published a Dantean trilogy of books (Purgatory, Anteparadise, and The New Life), wrote poems in the sky above New York City, bulldozed poems in the Chilean desert, and helped to form the art collective “Colectivo de Accion de Arte” that used performance as an act of political resistance.

Find information about other Poetry Foundation events at www.poetryfoundation.org/programs/events