BiblioVault - Books about 1914-1953

Becoming Julia de Burgos

The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon

Vanessa Perez Rosario

University of Illinois Press, 2014

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century.

In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Pérez-Rosario situates Julia de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Becoming Julia de Burgos departs from the prevailing emphasis on the poet and intellectual as a nationalist writer to focus on her contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture. It moves beyond the standard tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to place her within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture to consider more carefully the complex history of the island and the diaspora. Pérez-Rosario unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

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Dylan Thomas’ Early Prose

A Study in Creative Mythology

Annis Pratt

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970

This first full-scale treatment of the early prose of Dylan Thomas demonstrates the unity of his total work. Pratt argues that the inward journey of the poetic imagination which is implicit in poetry is often explicit in prose. Her study of Thomas’ early prose alongside his early poetry helps to elucidate all of his writing.
Pratt includes three appendices: a chronology, a summary of the critics’ attitudes toward the problem of influence, and a bibliographical sketch of materials in the Parris surrealist magazine transition, which are paralleled in Thomas’ prose.

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I Am My Own Path

Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos

Edited and with an introduction by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

University of Texas Press, 2023

A definitive, bilingual selection of poetry, essays, and letters by one of Puerto Rico’s most beloved poets.

Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) is best known for her poetry, but she is also an important cultural figure famous for her commitment to social justice, feminist ideas, and the independence of Puerto Rico. Admirers cultivated her legacy to bring to light the real Julia de Burgos, the woman behind the public figure, which this remarkable collection further illuminates by supplying a complex portrait using her own powerful and imaginative words.

Beginning with a critical introduction to Burgos's life and work, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario then presents a selection of poems, essays, and letters, that offer a glimpse into this formidable talent and intellect. Burgos left Puerto Rico, spending the 1940s in both New York City and Havana, where she cultivated a new kind of identity refracted through her pathbreaking work as a poet and journalist. Both poetry and prose are alive with politically charged insights into the struggle of national liberation, literary creation, and being a woman in a patriarchal society. I Am My Own Path is essential reading for anyone interested in Puerto Rican literature and culture as well as a foundational text of Latinx and Chicanx literature and culture in the United States.

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Julia de Burgos

La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño

Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. Traducido por Isabel Zapata, en colaboración con la autora

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Durante más de cincuenta años, Julia de Burgos ha evocado sentimientos de identidad y unión entre puertorriqueños y latinxs en Estados Unidos. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario va más allá del enfoque trágico de otras biografías de Burgos para examinar la vida de la artista considerando el trasfondo de la cultura puertorriqueña y la compleja historia de la isla y la diáspora. Enfocándose en Burgos como escritora y activista, Pérez-Rosario profundiza en su desarrollo artístico, su experiencia como migrante, sus luchas contra el colonialismo y la injusticia social y sus contribuciones a la cultura literaria y visual latinoamericanas. Al mismo tiempo, desentraña las dinámicas culturales y políticas que operan en las revisiones y reinvenciones de Burgos que escritores y artistas latinxs contemporáneos en Nueva York llevan a cabo para imaginar nuevas posibilidades para sí mismos y sus comunidades.

Disponible por primera vez en español, Julia de Burgos cuenta la destacada historia de la poeta y activista puertorriqueña.

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