Danielle Legros Georges, Boston Poet Laureate, and Alan Smith Soto, poet, translator, editor, share their work and that of other immigrant and refugee poets, giving voice to the contributions such poets have made to the U.S. literary landscape.
Danielle Legros Georges, the current Poet Laureate of the City of Boston, is a professor in the Creative Arts in Learning Division of Lesley University. She also teaches in the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences summer Writer’s Workshop, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poems have been widely anthologized, and recent essays of hers have appeared in Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (ed. Abayomi Animashaun) and Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond (eds. Kendahl Radcliffe and Jennifer Scott). She is the author of two books of poems, Maroon and The Dear Remote Nearness of You, the chapbook Letters from Congo, and editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems.
Alan Smith Soto is the Associate Chair of Romance Studies and Professor of Spanish at Boston University. His teaching and research interests include Galdós, Lorca, contemporary Spanish poetry, Cervantes, César Vallejo, and the theory of aesthetics in literature and the plastic arts. His poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies around the globe. His book of poems, Fragmentos de alcancía, was published in 1998, with the support of the Consulate of Spain in Boston. His second book of poetry, Libro del lago was published in Madrid, in 2014 by Árdora Ediciones. He was guest editor and translator of Spain’s Poetry of Conscience, a special issue of International Poetry Review (Spring, 2006). Professor Smith has received a Fulbright Scholarship and a Whiting Fellowship.
