Eulalia Press Presents: Edith Adams, Laura Cesarco Eglin & Lauren Shapiro (Triple Book Launch)

Don’t miss this exciting, triple book launch at City of Asylum, celebrating new works from local indie press Eulalia Books. The launch will feature the translators of the three works, Edith Adams (Guerrilla Blooms), Laura Cesarco Eglin (The Mistaken Place of Things), and Lauren Shapiro (Waking in the Sahara), who will discuss the art and process of translation. The poets behind these translated works—Gabriela Aguirre Sánchez, Daniela Catrileo, and Zaira Pacheco—will join the discussion virtually to share their poetry and participate in the audience Q&A. 

Eulalia Books publishes contemporary poetry from Latin America—specifically, by writers whose work has not yet appeared in a full-length English translation. They believe that poetry thrives outside the margins of privilege, and they love translators who work on the ground to find these books. Their full-length books introduce Latin American poets (writing in a variety of languages) to an English readership, while foregrounding the role of translators as artists and collaborators. Their letterpress chapbook series, focused on experimental translations and translingual writing, is dedicated to a vital discourse on translation, language/s, and translation poetics.

This program will be followed by a reception open to all attendees. 

About the Books:

Guerilla Blooms (Daniela Catrileo)

A leading voice in Mapuche literature, Daniela Catrileo traverses territories, languages, and chronologies, collapsing time and space to draw an enmeshed lineage from the arrival of the conquistadors to ongoing state violence against the Mapuche people. This kaleidoscopic work exposes the pervasive harm of colonialism while underscoring the political and ethical urgency of poetry, where vital modes of resistance and collaboration flourish. Guerrilla Blooms, Daniela Catrileo’s English-language debut, delivers an incisive critique of colonial power and violence.

The Mistaken Place of Things (Gabriela Aguirre)

Award-winning translator Laura Cesarco Eglin, traces the delicate intersections of presence and absence. Situated in everyday life, Aguirre’s work delves into the significance of places and spaces, not as static entities but as dynamic arenas for reflection. Her poetry is a quest through zones of attachment and distancing, and an invitation to seek out a place in the world of people and things, to never stop seeking.

Waking in the Sahara (Zaira Pacheco)

In the vibrant, minimalist landscape of this book, Puerto Rican poet Zaira Pacheco examines the interplay between illumination and obscurity, using cracks, fissures, pockets of shadows, and ancient water flows to reveal and conceal the traces of human presence. With an essential introduction by poet-translator, Lauren Shapiro, Waking in the Sahara is a dizzying exploration of origins set against the timeless backdrop of rock and sand. Pacheco, with Shapiro, constricts language to delve deeply into the spaces that lie beneath the limits of their names.

About the Translators:

Edith Adams is a translator and scholar of contemporary Latin American literature. Her translations have appeared in Guernica, Latin American Literature Today, mercury firs, New England Review, Northwest Review, and Words Without Borders, as well as in two anthologies: Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (HarperCollins) and Best Literary Translations Anthology (Deep Vellum). She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is writing a dissertation on the legacies of colonial naming practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including the chapbooks Between Gone and Leaving—Home (dancing girl press) and Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254). Her poems and translations (from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician), have appeared in many journals such as Asymptote, Figure 1, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, SRPR, Arsenic Lobster, International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Timber, and more. Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Claus and the Scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal (co•im•press), longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award in Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), which was the winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. She translated from the Portuñol, together with Jesse Lee Kercheval, Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books). Cesarco Eglin the publisher of Veliz Books. More at lauracesarcoeglin.com.

Lauren Shapiro is the author of BRID (Veliz Books, 2024), Arena (CSU Poetry Center, 2020), listed as a top poetry book of 2020 in The New York Times, and Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry. With Kevin González, she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Rescue Press, 2013). She has written two chapbooks of poems, House (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press) and Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2011). Individual poems have appeared in jubilat, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Sixth Finch, Oversound, Annulet, Poetry Northwest, Diode Mississippi Review, and Drunken Boat, among other places. She has translated creative work from Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, and Arabic into English. She is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant Cucina Alfabeto is closed on Sundays and Mondays, but a cash wine bar will be available.