Keynote Hispanic Presentation by Coral Bracho - The 48th Louisville Conference On Literature and Culture Since 1900

Coral Bracho is the author of several collections of poetry, including El ser que va a morir (1982); Tierra de entraña ardiente (1992), a collaboration with painter Irma Palacios; Ese espacio, ese jardín (2003), which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize; and Cuarto de hotel (2007). Firefly under the Tongue: Selected Poems (2008) was translated by Forrest Gander. Bracho’s impact on Mexican poetry has been compared to John Ashbery’s influence on American verse. As Gander observes, “Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound. . . . Bracho’s early poems make sense first as music, and music propels them.” A selection of poems from her first two collections was included in the anthologies Medusario (1996, ed. Roberto Echavarren, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí), Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002), and Líneas Conectadas: nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos (Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico) (2006, ed. Luis Cortés Bargalló and Forrest Gander). Her poetry was translated for the Poetry Translation Center’s 2005 World Poets’ Tour by Tom Boll and Katherine Pierpoint. Bracho’s honors include the Aguacalientes National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives and teaches in Mexico City.