New Poetry: Farid Matuk and Cristina Pérez Díaz

Join us on Saturday, April 5 at 4pm for a celebration of new books by two poet-translators—Farid Matuk and Cristina Pérez Díaz—whose work traverses colonial traumas, dreaming multiple identities and utopian experiments in pleasure, community, and belonging that break with systems of containment. The event will be introduced and moderated by Matvei Yankelevich, editor of World Poetry and Winter Editions.

Farid Matuk is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press). His poems have been anthologized in Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora and Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. As a translator, Matuk’s projects include Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrílica and Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist. Matuk is the recipient of a 2024 USA Fellowship. A previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, an inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, and a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence.

Cristina Pérez Díaz is a Puerto Rican writer and translator who holds degrees in classics and philosophy. Her translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona won the 2023 ASTR Translation Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Eterna Cadencia, and other journals. Haunted by the violent legacies of colonialism on both landscape and bodies, her first book deliriously dreams with the foundation of a country from the bed of two lovers. From the Founding of the Country (Winter Editions, Spring 2025) has garnered praise from Mara Pastor, Chloe García Roberts, Phoebe Giannisi, Margarita Pintado Burgos, and Isabel Sobral Campos, who writes “Pérez Díaz's dazzling poem stretches the borders between languages and histories, unearthing a chasm that challenges the colonial forces behind its eruption.”