Description:

Please join the English department & the Poetry & Poetics cluster, as part of the UNSETTLING SOUND event series, for a reading by the poet Urayoán Noel.

This year, our event series is "Unsettling Sound." Unsettling Sound foregrounds the entanglement between poetics and sound to explore the integral, esoteric, and, occasionally, uncomfortable manner in which sound contributes to and develops expressive meaning. Defining sound as vibrational and only sometimes including audio, we track the vibrations and resonances between text-based and non-text-based arts. Unsettling Sound asks: What is the sound of poetry? What makes poetry sound? What are the new and vanguard interventions in the dark matter between language and sonority? Shepherding together inquiries into text, music, translation, embodiment, performance, and materialities, Unsettling Sound stewards the development of poetic practices in sounding and listening, critically and creatively, in both orthodox and unorthodox ways. 

Urayoán Noel is a writer, translator, and performer from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Noel is the author of ten books in English and Spanish, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014, winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award); the performance text EnUncIAdOr (2014); and the poetry collections Boringkén (2008, named a Book of the Year by El Nuevo Día), Hi-Density Politics (2010, a National Books Critics Circle Small Press Highlights selection), and Transversal (2021, named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library). Noel’s translations include no budu please by Wingston González and adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado. A Letras Boricuas fellow in poetry and the recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Center, Noel has been a finalist for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Poetry Series Paz Prize for Poetry, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Modern Language Association book prizes. An editorial advisor for Latino Poetry (Library of America), Noel has been both fellow and faculty at CantoMundo and the Macondo Writers Workshop and has performed internationally at Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art. Noel’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Beta-Local, Casa de los Contrafuertes, and Taller Boricua and has been published in The New York Times, Poetry, and Google Arts & Culture. A founding member of The Latinx Project at NYU and Editor-in-Chief of its digital publication Intervenxions, Noel currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies for NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish and previously taught at SUNY Albany and for Stetson University’s low-residency MFA program. Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and is currently completing Neural Sea, a hybrid lipogrammatic work engaging neurodivergence, disability, queerness, and displacement.