Institute for Latino Studies faculty member and MFA alum Francisco Aragón gave two presentations this summer in England. The first took place on July 15th at the Cervantes Institute, where Aragón read from his translation of, Handbook of Foams/Manual de espumas by Spanish poet Gerardo Diego. Aragón performed his own poems on July 18th at Torriano Meeting House, a cultural community center. He began his week in London as the special guest at a literary salon held in a private home on July 12th. Professor Aragón’s visit was supported by a Small Creative and Performing Arts grant from the Franco Family Institute and the ND Arts Initiative.
The event at Instituto Cervantes included the collaboration of British Latinx poets Leo Boix, Marina Sánchez and Soledad Santana. “The performance at Cervantes was the third stop of a multi-year tour where I’ll be inviting poets to join me in amplifying Gerardo Diego’s work. The poets in London that night also read a poem of their own—in conversation with Diego,” said Aragón, who directs Letras Latinas, the ILS’ literary initiative. Gerardo Diego (1896 – 1987), a member of Spain’s noted “generation of ’27,” wrote Manual de espumas in 1922 while living in a beach bungalow on the north coast of Spain. Aragón’s translation, published earlier this year by Shearsman Books, is the first English rendering of what many scholars consider one of Diego’s master avant-garde collections.
The reading at Torriano Meeting House two days later was part of Venn Diagrams, a reading series curated by British Latinx poet, Patrizia Longhitano. Billed as a “Latinx special edition,” the evening included the participation of poets Sim Pereira-Madder, Roberto Cenciarelli and, once again, Boix. “Leo was instrumental in helping me arrange my week—I couldn’t have done it without him. He’s a wonderful poet, editor, and translator. In fact, Letras Latinas aspires to bring Leo Boix to Notre Dame as a way of signaling ILS’ global reach,” added Aragón.
“Francisco’s visit felt like another important step in the transatlantic conversation we have been building for years now between US and British Latinx poets. An earlier collaboration brought writers from both sides of the Atlantic into dialogue, virtually. Having Francisco in London allowed that conversation to take on a new, tangible life,” said Boix, who was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
“What excites me most is how this continuing exchange reveals both what connects our literary communities and what makes them distinct. We write from different histories and different sides of the Atlantic, but our poetry travels through many of the same territories: migration and belonging, bilingualism and diaspora, Latin America and the places we now call home, Spanish and English—and everything untranslatable in between. His time with us strengthened an alliance that was already flourishing, while opening new possibilities for collaboration,” added Boix, the award-winning poet and author of two books in Spanish, published in his native Argentina, and two books in English, published in the UK, the most recent, Southernmost: Sonnets (2025), which was shortlisted for the Foreword Prize in 2025 for best poetry collection.
The literary salon that kicked off Aragón’s week in the British capital was hosted by Nathalie Teitler, who has run literature programs promoting diversity in the United Kingdom for more than twenty years. She also served as co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Un Nuevo Sol (2019), which showcases British Latinx writers, and which Aragón had endorsed with a blurb.
Notre Dame’s campus community will have an opportunity to experience a multi-voiced presentation of Gerardo Diego’s poetry on September 30th as part of “En Otras Palabras: panel & performance.” Aragón will be joined by poet-translators, Rosa Alcalá, Kristin Dykstra, and Rachel Galvin who, in addition to reading from Handbook of Foams, will each perform a piece
of their own. Attendees will also hear Alcalá and Dykstra read from their own work that evening. Earlier in the day, Galvin will introduce and moderate an afternoon panel on poetry in translation. These two sessions are co-presented by ILS and Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program, of which Aragón is an alum.