POETRY / Caribbean & Latin American

Chiapas Maya Awakening demonstrates that Mayas are neither a vanished ancient civilization nor a remote, undeveloped people. Instead, through their memorable poems and stories, the indigenous writers of this volume claim a place of their own within the broader fields of national and global literature.

Eugenio Montejo was one of the most significant Latin American poets and essayists of the past half century. Montejo (who died in 2008) was awarded both the National Prize for Literature in his native Venezuela and the prestigious Octavio Paz International Poetry and Essay Prize. This long-overdue volume offers selections from all ten of Montejo’s books of poetry, as well as a handful of exemplary prose works. All of the selections are presented here in the original Spanish, with translations in English by Kirk Nesset, a prize-winning American writer and poet.

In this first English-language translation of a significant corpus of Nahuatl poetry into English, Miguel León-Portilla was assisted in his rethinking, augmenting, and rewriting in English by Grace Lobanov. Biographies of fifteen composers of Nahuatl verse and analyses of their work are followed by their extant poems in Nahuatl and in English.