What is a book? It stinks. B.O…O.K. Like a drunk. L’IVRE. Each one is a long island, brother. L.I. BRO. A kit full of As and Bs. KITĀB. Latin LIBERation & Saxon BOG. The Taíno language would not have had a word for it but it had GUAROCO = to know, but also to remember (see petroglyphs). A book is a way of knowing, re-membering what is forever lost in translation.
—Urayoán Noel
Urayoán Noel is a South Bronx-based writer, critic, performer, translator and intermedia artist originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is an associate professor of English and Spanish at New York University, and also teaches at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Noel is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015), as well as the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latina/o Studies Book Award. As translator, his works include the bilingual edition Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books, forthcoming) and the chapbook No Budu Please by Wingston González, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. His non-print work ranges from durational performance and text-sound-video installations to collaborative projects with musician/composer Monxo López, artist Martha Clippinger, and dancer/choreographer Alethea Pace, among others. Noel has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and CantoMundo. His vlog is wokitokiteki.com.