The Letter

Giannina Braschi reads from her fourth novel, Putinoika, a meditation on how the poet’s language is already equipped to respond to catastrophe—and transform it—through mouthfuls of humorous and sublime wordplay, into a manual against censorship.
This episode was made with the support of the Arts Fund of the Brooklyn Arts Council, Poets&Writers, and The New York State Council of the Arts.
At Pratt Institute, it also received the support of the Department of Humanities & Media Studies, the Creative Writing Program, The School of Arts, and The School of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Special thanks to Gina Marchetti, Joshua Tan, Jorge Oliver, and Peter West. Special thanks to Tess O'Dwyer for her continuous support.  

This a letter to Jocelyn Carranza, who was 11 years old when she gave us her life after being harassed by her US schoolmates because of the immigration status of her parents. This is a letter about Latino Poetry, the comprehensive, urgent, groundbreaking volume for the annals of United States, compiling 186 voices pacing from past to future of our literature, edited by Rigoberto González, and published by The Library of America. This letter is the first of our live readings series, funded in part by Poets & Writers, as well as public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and by the Brooklyn Arts Fund of The Brooklyn Arts Councils, also supported by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.

This letter is addressed to the beloved one who is always suspicious yet never reveals: our essay on the recent novel "The Palace of Eros," by the Uruguayan-American Caro de Robertis, in the context of the current genocide, systemic violence, and the communitarian enlightenment through bodily emancipation that offers another taste for those classic narratives.
This episode was developed with the support of the NYSCA Artist grant 2024.

This letter is addressed to the friends we have lost in the hope that literature, our literatura, will provide a pact of love. In that hope, as well, we delve into the spiritual pacts that books can offer, such as the ones in novels by Mariana Enríquez, Ursula K. Le Guin, José Donoso and Zora Neale Hurston.
This episode was developed with the support of the NYSCA Artist grant 2024.

This special episode has been our own ritual to never forget what happened with literature in Chile since September 11th, 1973. It was recorded on September 11th, 2023, for us to grasp that previous moment of complete potentiality, and to manifest that fuerza into our lives and books.

This letter seeks for empathy from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, whose parents applied for asylum. We reflect on the exhibition No existe un mundo poshuracán through the book while they sleep: under the bed is another country, by poet roque raquel salas rivera, as well as Shellyne Rodriguez’s Third World Mixtapes.

This letter is addressed to all the migrant children who are currently being forced to work in the United States. We read Gabriela Mistral, the first Latina Nobel Prize of Literature, to look for the many names of those migrant children.