A Conversation with Emma Trelles
Listen in on an oral history conversation with 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California Emma Trelles, interviewed by fellow poet Silvia Curbelo. Uncover Trelles’ path from childhood family field trips to bookstores through her unexpected early career as journalist and art critic to the ways her bedtime “letters to herself” in her beloved notebook form the basis of her poems.
Experience the Episode
Presented by Institute for Latino Studies
Wednesday, October 16, 2024 12:00 pm
Listen in on an oral history conversation with 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California Emma Trelles, interviewed by fellow poet Silvia Curbelo. Uncover Trelles’ path from childhood family field trips to bookstores through her unexpected early career as journalist and art critic to the ways her bedtime “letters to herself” in her beloved notebook form the basis of her poems.
The Letras Latinas Oral History Project produces video interviews of Latinx writers visiting the Notre Dame campus with the aim of making them available as an online resource for faculty, students, scholars, and the community at large. For more information, please visit the Letras Latinas website.
MoreMeet the Poet: Emma Trelles
Emma Trelles is the 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara (2021-23) and a 2023 recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. In August 2022, she was named one of 22 Poet Laureate Fellows across the country by the Academy of American Poets. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for Foreword-Indies poetry book of the year. She is writing a new collection of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work is anthologized in Best American Poetry; Verse Daily; Best of the Net; Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity; To Give Life A Shape: Poems Inspired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and has taught poetry and creative writing workshops in academic and community based settings such as the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Santa Barbara City College, Antioch University-Santa Barbara, and the Pintura Palabra project at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.
Emma has presented her work at venues across the country, including The Bryant Park Reading Room in New York, The Poet and the Poem series at the Library of Congress, Busboys & Poets in Washington D.C., the Miami Book Fair, the Ojai Art Center, the Milwaukee Public Library-Central Branch, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, the University of Notre Dame, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.
She is a CantoMundo Fellow and the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Emma was born and raised in Miami, and after working for many years in South Florida as an arts and culture journalist, she now lives with her husband in California, where she curates the Mission Poetry Series. She is the series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize from Gunpowder Press, open to Latina/e/o/x poets who reside in the U.S. and published in bilingual editions in the spring.
Meet the Poet: Silvia Curbelo
Silvia Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S with her family as a child. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both from Anhinga Press, and two chapbooks. Awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Nobel Maxwell Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and more than three dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin), the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature and, more recently, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, which was released in September of 2024.