MIAMI.- Last year, the Cuatrogatos Foundation and the Artefactus Cultural Project center resumed a poetry reading cycle with the participation of local authors, with the purpose of bringing the guest writer and his work closer to the audience. The first guests after the forced break due to the pandemic were the actress and writer Teresa María Rojas and a few months later the poet Orlando Rossardi.
Beginning the new year 2024, the guest will be the poet, narrator and playwright José Abreu Felippe, who will give a conversation and recital about his poetry under the title The Age of Time.
Jos Abreu Felippe was born in Havana, Cuba and has developed an outstanding career as a writer. He is the eldest in a family of writers, along with his brothers Juan and Nicols. The three have a solid work in various genres and are literary united in the book Habanera fue, in homage to his mother.
The poetic work of Jos Abreu Felippe includes the books Orestes at night (1985), Songs and elegies (1992), The weather outsidefor which he won the 2000 Gastn Baquero International Poetry Prize; Back (2012), Time in half: my poetry (2015), which brings together his books published in the genre, as well as collections of poems and poems that appear for the first time in that volume. Also Dying by Sections (2022) and working on The Dead Animals, soon to appear.
Regarding this new book, the author expresses: I am about to conclude something that I will most likely group as The Dead Animals and that I hope to publish this year. They are poems that revolve around one of the recurring themes in my poetry, life trying to mock death.
The Cuatrogatos Foundation, created by writers Sergio Andrican and Antonio Orlando Rodríguez, is an institution with educational and cultural purposes, focused on children and young people, as well as adults, which has a continuous and multidisciplinary program of activities.
The organization’s mission is to promote the publication, knowledge and reading of quality books, published in Spanish, that develop aesthetic appreciation and strengthen the creative and analytical capacities, especially of children and young people. The entity’s website also emphasizes that they intend to preserve, share and disseminate the Hispanic American cultural heritage in the United States.
The Artefactus cultural center, which last year celebrated 15 years of experience, established the Authors program in the spring of 2008 with the purpose of contributing to the dissemination of Latin American writers and promoting literature, says Eddy Díaz Souza, who adds: since then has featured numerous important storytellers, playwrights, essayists and poets.
The series of poetic readings, which will be held on Saturday, January 13 with José Abreu Felippe, is in this spirit of working together.
The guest author will read poems from his published books and other unpublished texts and talk with the public about his creative work. In addition to being a poet, Abreu Felippe is the author of the pentalogy Forgetfulness and calmwhich includes the novels Barrio Azul, Sabanalamar, Always the Rain (finalist in the Letras de Oro contest, 1993), The instant y Say goodbye to the Virgin.
Abreu expresses about his relationship with poetry: Poetry has always been what has intrigued me the most and what has attracted me the most. I have tried to get as close to her as I could, to feel her presence. I don’t know if I ever achieved it. Poetry is like a naughty child who runs away.
For his entire career as a playwright, he received the Bacchus Award in 2012, awarded to him by Teatro Miami Studio. In his dramaturgy, Amar as stands out; Theater that brings together five pieces; Hostages; Three pieces; shoot (work integrated into the book Three playwrights, three generations). In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Mariel exodus, I republished the piece Amar Así, written in Cuba in 1980 in the midst of the Mariel events. In 2021 I collected part of his dramaturgy in Teatro Reunion.
This January, Jos Abreu Felippe receives the El Ateje Editorial Prize for Narrative, for his entire work as a novelist and short story writer. Among his books of stories stand out Deadly Tales, I am not a vegetarian, Confrontations, Yesterday’s path, Thirty-two stories, The green flies y Naked stories.
The Age of Time, a meeting with the writer José Abreu Felippe, will take place on Saturday, January 13, at 8:30 pm, at the Artefactus cultural center, 12302 SW 133rd Ct., Miami, 33186. Admission will be free.
