Nela Rio at Odd Sundays

Poetry reading: Nela Rio featured at odd sundays at molly’s, Fredericton’s longest running semimonthly poetry reading series. (New Brunswick, the poetry province.)

Sunday, May 6, 2007, 2pm
Molly’s Coffee House
554 Queen Street, Fredericton

Featured reader, Nela Rio, is a visual artist, poet, academic, critic. Rio’s great heart, steady focus, and generous spirit have combined with her academic career to give us an invaluable connection to women and their struggles with systemic violence and disenfranchisement. Through her literary connections and activist sensibilities, Rio has given women the chance to tell their stories, whether in response to state, domestic or cultural oppression. George Elliott Clarke says of her: "Rio, as a feminist heir to the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, calls on us to recognize that history . . . shuts its stone pages / burying / the women who write it. Rio achieves an intoxicating lightness of style matched with unbearably intense feeling."

Born in Argentina, Rio became a Canadian citizen in 1977 and holds membership in writers’ organizations in Spain, Argentina, Chile, the United States, and Canada. Author of eight books of poetry, six of them in both Spanish and English, her work has made the short list for a dozen international literary contests. Her poems and short stories have been translated into English and French, and have been published in Spain, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Poland, Brazil, Honduras, the United States and Canada. Her work is used in university courses in the United States and Canada. Uncontained by literature alone, her creativity explodes also into visual art, and Rio’s “Visual Metaphors” interlace with her literary works.

Open Set: Bring lyrics, drama, fiction, drama, or music, to present in the open set. If it is created from words, we want it.

Please join us at 2 pm on Sunday, May 6, at Molly’s Coffee House, for an afternoon engaged with literature. For information, please contact allison calvern —acalvern@nbnet.nb.ca (Just say yes to poetry.)