2023 S.A. Yoder Memorial Lecture featuring Urayoán Noel happening Feb. 9

S.A. Yoder Memorial Lecture Series: Adjacent Islands: A Geopoetics of Translation
Date & Time: Thursday, February 9 at 7 p.m.
Location: Umble Center
Cost: Free and open to the public

Urayoán Noel

Urayoán Noel, a Puerto Rican poet, translator and performer who teaches at New York University, will present the 2023 S.A. Yoder Memorial Lecture, “Adjacent Islands: A Geopoetics of Translation” on Thursday, Feb. 9 at 7 p.m. in the Umble Center. This event is free and open to the public.

Noel is the author of numerous books, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award, and of eight books of poetry, including Transversal (University of Arizona Press, 2021), named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library. Noel’s translations include No Budu Please by Wingston González (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (UDP/DoubleCross Press/La Impresora, 2022).

Noel has been a finalist for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the International Latino Book Awards, the National Poetry Series Paz Prize for Poetry, and the Modern Language Association book prizes. His other honors include a National Books Critics Circle Small Press Highlights selection and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center, as well as a Letras Boricuas fellowship in poetry from the Mellon and Flamboyán Foundations.

Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and is a translator for the Puerto Rican Literature Project and an editorial advisor for the Latino Poetry initiative (Library of America).

The S.A. Yoder Lecture Series honors Dr. Samuel A. Yoder, a professor at Goshen College from 1930 to 1935 and again from 1946 until his death in 1970. During his career, he was a Fulbright lecturer at Anatolia College in Greece, Smith-Mundt lecturer at the University of Hue in Vietnam, visiting professor at Taiwan University in Formosa, welfare officer under the United Nations in Egypt and GC Study-Service Term leader in Jamaica. Gifts to the series by his students, friends, and family have made the endowed lecture possible.