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 daughter of Cuban immigrants and author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her current manuscript Courage and the Clock was a finalist for the 2026 Louise Bogan Award for poetry and shortlisted for the 2025 Donald Hall Prize. She is the ninth Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California, and the recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A graduate CantoMundo Fellow, her translations were longlisted in the Best Literary Translations 2027 anthology, and her work recently appears in Poetry International; New England Review; Poetry; and the Academy’s Poem-A-Day series. She is series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize, open to Latine poets in the U.S. and published in bilingual editions by Gunpowder Press. emmatrelles.com
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.