I think many of us dream of writing poetry when we are young. We try our hand at it a couple of times, amass pages in a notebook, and eventually find the courage to print out a few fledgling poems. Our heads bowed, we dare to show those poems to someone we admire, a teacher […]
Gabriel asked for a dog several times when he was a little boy. But we didn’t want to get a dog. “Too much trouble,” we said. “Who needs a dog? Neither of us had a dog when we were growing up and we turned out fine.” Gabriel had to be content with a stuffed animal, […]
I was a student both of Professor Juan Roura-Parella and his wife, the lovely Teresa. Professor Roura taught me about aesthetics and philosophy, Goya’s black paintings, the poetry of Antonio Machado, and what it means to be a political exile. The lovely Teresa taught me classical Spanish guitar, to move gracefully, and how to look […]
There was a time – I was still young, in my mid-20s – when I thought I was going to be a perennial traveller, a woman without a country or permanent address, a vagabond. Not that I was ever the backpacker type. I liked lace blouses and high heels too much. In my fantasy image […]
The night of February 20, 2014 an overflow crowd of passionate Cuban-American fans awaited the island writer, Leonardo Padura, at the Coral Gables Congregational Church. Books & Books, the organizer of the event, together with the Cuban Research Institute of Florida International University, had wisely foreseen the need to move the reading to the larger […]