Please join Professor Coleman, along with poets Nandi Comer, Marwa Helal, and Jonah-Mixon-Webster, for the launch of his translation of Nicolás Guillén's book The Great Zoo.

The book is a fantastical collection of poems by revolutionary Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén presented in a Spanish-English bilingual edition. Born in Cuba to parents of African and European ancestry, Nicolás Guillén worked in printing presses and studied law before moving into Havana’s literary scene. A virtuosic maker and breaker of forms, Guillén rose to fame by transforming a popular form of Cuban music into poetry that called attention to the experience of Afro-Cuban people, and he continued to interweave his artistic and political commitments as he traveled the world.

Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The “animals” on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others. Translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen understanding of the contexts of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition stands as a testament to Guillén’s carnivalesque vision.

Aaron Coleman is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the poetry collection Threat Come Close, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the chapbook St. Trigger, selected for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Coleman has received fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Program, Cave Canem Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Boston Review, and Callaloo.