Thoughts

There are events for #evolutionarypoems! Here's what we have so far:

• Austin, Alienated Majesty, Tuesday, November 25, 2025, more info here.
• Washington DC: Lost City Books, Thursday, December 4, 2025
• Arlington, VA: Marymount Ballston Center, December 5, 2025, 7 p.m.

Here's a flyer for the Marymount University event:

More Vinod Kumar Shukla news: he's won the Jnanpith Award, one of India's most prestigious awards. The official site for the award doesn't seem to have been updated yet, though it's in a bunch of news stories out of India.

(Also! Literary Activism has put out an Indian edition of Treasurer of Piggy Banks. You can go there and read translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's introduction to Treasurer of Piggy Banks, as well as another piece he wrote about the poet.)

A launch for The Rust of History will be held in New York on March 3 at Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street. The event starts at 7 p.m., doors at 6:30.

Present will be:

Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, which have been longlisted and shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Pen America Open Book Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the New Voices Award from the Festival de la Palabra, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, the Laureate Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate the poetry of his grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. He has co-edited the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), various folios, and the literary journal The Wanderer. This year he will participate in no existe mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose title borrows a verse from his fourth poetry book while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds, LLC, 2019). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and lives, teaches, and writes in Puerto Rico, where he also works as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña /The Puerto Rican Literature Project, a free, bilingual, user-friendly, and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.

Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a BA in Creative Writing from UPR-Río Piedras and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU. Their creative and academic research interests center on disaster poetics, queerness, race, gender, and migration in Caribbean literatures and cultures. In 2018, they published their first short story collection, Mala leche. They currently pursue doctoral studies at NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Willie Perdomo is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, and Where a Nickel Costs of Dime. Winner of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the New York City Book Award, and a PEN Open Book Award, Perdomo was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He is co-editor of the anthology, Latínext, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, African Voices, and Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and was appointed State Poet of New York, 2021–2023.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the co-editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón and the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral/Colaterales (Akashic Press/National Poetry Series). His first collection of poems is The Life Assignment (Four Way Books). A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queer|Arts|Mentorship and CantoMundo, he serves as the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center’s Co-Director, and along with Raquel Salas Rivera, Enrique Olivares Pesante and Claire Jimenez, is part of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña.

We've been a bit remiss on keeping this up. But a few things to note:

• Kulleh Grasi made an appearance at the Sami Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale. His group of musicians, Kulleh Comrades, can be seen performing at the opening here (their performance starts at about 2:48). And his reading on the second day can be seen here (he starts at about 3:20).
• On May 9th at 7 p.m., there's a launch party for Pee Poems at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. Details here; it's in-person (!) and ticketed. Translator Lynn Xu will be reading; and it's also a launch for Line and Light by Jeffrey Yang, friend of Circumference and a member of our advisory board.

And Joshua Edwards keeps an updated list of events here – there might be more Pee Poems events if you're around New York!