Sky Below

Zurita Portrait

Sky Below

Selected Works by Raúl Zurita
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Raúl Zurita is one of Latin America’s most celebrated and controversial poets. After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 US-supported military coup that ousted Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, Zurita’s poetry sought to register the violence and atrocities committed against the Chilean people and the corruption of the Spanish language. During the dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990, Zurita published a trilogy of books (Purgatory, Anteparadise, and The New Life), wrote poems in the sky above New York City, bulldozed poems in the Chilean desert, and helped to form the art collective “Colectivo de Accion de Arte,” which used performance as an act of political resistance.

Raúl Zurita reads selections from his work Sky Below (2016), and Anna Deeny Morales reads her translations of those poems.

Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, Center for Latin American Studies, Department of English, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

This event is free and open to the public.