The Department of Classical and Modern Languages & Literatures,
the M.A. Program in Spanish,
Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group,
and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute
are pleased to invite the general public to the

On-site launch of
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (no. 106)
Contemporary Dominican Writing and Art

The event will be led by Daniel Shapiro, Editor; with remarks by Dr. Ángel Estévez, Chair, Classical and Modern Languages & Literatures; and Dr. Ramona Hernández, Director, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute; comments by Néstor E. Rodríguez, Guest Editor (University of Toronto), and comments/bilingual readings by scholars and writers Aurora Arias, Frank Báez, Josefina Báez, Zaida Corniel, Rhina Espaillat (in-absentia), Elizabeth Russ, and Edgar Smith.

About the issue

Review 106, guest-edited by Néstor E. Rodríguez (University of Toronto), focuses on contemporary Dominican writing and arts, compiling articles by leading scholars and texts by writers residing in and outside the Dominican Republic. This issue is particularly important given the presence of the Dominican community at The City College of New York, Review’s host institution. The articles, by Emily A. Maguire, Sharina Maillo-Pozo, Danny Méndez, and Elizabeth Russ, address topics including challenges to hegemonic narratives, transnational dynamics in the borderlands, sexual identity, and blackness/whiteness, as manifested in works by Rita Indiana, Josefina Báez, Johan Mijail, and Jeannette Miller. The creative contents showcase fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by Rey Andújar, Aurora Arias, Frank Báez, Josefina Baéz, José Mármol, Miguel Yarull and others. The combined selections reflect the innovation and breadth of Dominican writing today. Features include a memorial piece on the late Sylvia Molloy by Prof. Andrea Weiss; an excerpt from Sergio Ramírez’s novel Dead Men Cast No Shadows; and poetry by Marjorie Agosín and Lorenzo García Vega. Reviews cover titles in translation by Pedro Mir, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Óscar Hahn, and Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum.

Review is published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, in association with The City College of New York, CUNY, Department of Classical and Modern Languages & Literatures.

About the speakers

All the participants have contributed to Review 106 (Contemporary Dominican Writing and Art).

Daniel Shapiro is Editor of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas and a Distinguished Lecturer at The City College of New York, Department of Classical and Modern Languages & Literatures. In addition to publishing various poetry collections, he has translated Latin American authors and received translation grants from PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Néstor E. Rodríguez (1971) is a Professor of Latin American Literatures and Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Crítica para tiempos de poco fervor (2009; Criticism for Times of Little Enthusiasm), Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature (2010) and Interposiciones (2019; Interpositions), among other publications.

Aurora Arias (Santo Domingo, 1962) is a poet and short story writer based in Michigan. She has published Vivienda de pájaros (1986; Bird Housing) and Piano lila (1994; Purple Piano), poetry; and Invi’s Paradise (1998), Fin de mundo (2000; End of the World), and Emoticons (2007), stories.

Frank Báez (Santo Domingo, 1978) is a Dominican poet, short-story writer, essayist, and editor. Among his books are Págales tú a los psicoanalistas (2006; For the Psychoanalysts, You Pick Up the Tab), Postales (2009; Postcards), Anoche soñé que era un DJ/Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ (2014), and Llegó el fin del mundo a mi barrio (2019; The End of the World Came to My Neighborhood, 2022). He is also co-founder of the spoken word ensemble El Hombrecito and editor of the online poetry journal Ping Pong. His text in Review 106 is from Báez’s non-fiction work Lo que trajo el mar (2020; What the Sea Brought).

Josefina Báez (La Romana, 1960) is a storyteller, ArteSana, performer, writer, and theatre director. She is the founder and director of Latinarte/Ay Ombe Theatre (1986). Her books include Dominicanish (2000), Comrade, Bliss Ain’t Playing (2007), Levente no (2012), and As Is É (2015).

Zaida Corniel is a writer, an academic and actress, and author of the short story collection Para adolescentes, premenopáusicas y especialistas de la salud (2019; For Adolescents, Premenopausal Women, and Health Specialists). One of her plays, Ay Fefa, Where is the Wind, has been staged at Dance Theater Workshop and Access Theater, in NYC. Her work has been included in Tertuliando/Hanging Out (1997), a bilingual anthology of essays and creative writing by Caribbean authors.

Rhina Espaillat has published poetry, essays, and short-story collections in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into both languages. Her work has earned many national and international awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry. Espaillat translated poems by José Mármol in Review 106.

Elizabeth Russ is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her book The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (2009) examines the plantation as a trans-American literary trope. Her article “Telling Other Stories: Dominican Black Cosmopolitanism in Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s Tablero” is forthcoming in PMLA. She is currently working on a book that analyzes representations of nation, race, and gender by twentieth-century women writers of the Dominican Republic, including Cartagena Portalatín and Jeannette Miller.

Edgar Smith (Santo Domingo, 1973), is a writer, editor, and translator, living in the U.S. since 2010. He has published sixteen books, including the novels La inmortalidad del cangrejo (2015; The Immortality of the Crab) and Gnuj & Alt (2016); La noventa (2021; The Ninety), poetry; and Through This Strange Window (2022), short stories.

The editors of Review thank the following institutions for helping promote Review 106: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute; CUNY Graduate Center/Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies; CUNY Graduate Center/Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures; Latin American Studies Association; New York University/The Center for Applied Liberal Arts, School of Professional Studies; Universidad de Salamanca/Cátedra Pedro Henríquez Ureña de Estudios Literarios Dominicanos.