On Saturday, October 8th, 2022, Professor Karen Jaime (LSP/PMA) launched Memorias de Miguel: The Hard Work of Love (Hemi Press 2022), a print and digital anthology including both prose and poetry that aims to celebrate the life and legacy of Nuyorican Poets Cafe founder, Miguel Algarín. Jaime hosted the launch at the Cafe, and performed alongside co-editors Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founding Poet, Lois Elaine Griffith and Joseph Cacerés, a PhD Candidate in English at the CUNY-Graduate Center, amongst others. For this anthology, Jaime draws from her previous on the Nuyorican and builds on her work as an HIDVL/Mellon Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University for 2022. Already an award-winning author—Jaime recently received the International Latino Book Awards’ Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award and was just selected as a finalist for the American Society for Theatre Research’s Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, Jaime continues to creatively focus on the art-making activist practices of significant figures emerging from marginalized communities.
“Memorias de Miguel, as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive that I curated for the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library, represents a collaborative effort and labor of love, aiming to highlight the legacy of an iconic literary and cultural figure.”
This print and digital anthology includes portraits of the creative producers alongside audio recordings of their submissions. Readers and listeners are able to access the anthology online: https://memorias-de-miguel.hemispheric.org/en.
Professor Jaime holds a joint appointment in Latina/o Studies and the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.
