Always a Stranger: The Poetry of Refugees and Others on the Margins

On May 22^nd, 2014 Cecilia Llompart discussed her new book The Wingless and explored what it meant to be an artist, specifically that it may require feeling you’re on the “outside” at one point or other in your life. The discussion went into whether differing languages have different beauties, and what it’s like to live as an artist and to attempt to make a living as an artist.

Cecilia Llompart was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida. Her first collection, The Wingless, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in the spring of 2014. She is the recipient of two awards from the Academy of American Poets, and her poems have appeared inTriQuarterly, The Caribbean Writer, poets.org, and other journals. Most recently, she served as guest editor for Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary, and she will be teaching high school students while serving as chair of creative writing for BLUR: The Blue Ridge Summer Institute for Young Artists in June 2014.