Join us for the virtual Monday Poets Reading Series, hosted by poet Warren Longmire. There will be a short Q & A with poets Lilvia Soto and Carmen Amato Tejeda after the reading. Register for this free event at mondaypoets.eventbrite.com. 

Lilvia Soto, Ph.D., poet, essayist, and independent researcher, was a professor of Spanish American ilterature at Harvard University and an administrator (Assistant Dean) at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first director of La Casa Latina: The Univserity of Pennsylvania Center for Hispanic Excellence and the Resident Director of the Study Abroad Program in Seville, Spain, for students of Cornell, Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Soto was born in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, and migrated to the United States at the age of fiffteen. She resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has published poetry, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and literary translations in journals and anthologies in many countries. Her collection of bilingual poems, bajo las palabras / under the words, appeared in Editorial Garabatos, Hermosillo, Sonora, in 2015. Her second collection of bilingual poems, Lengua lanzadera enhebrada / Tongue Threaded Shuttle, was published in 2017, also in Editorial Garabatos. She is preparing a collection of poems and essays about her ancestors in the context of the Mexican Revolution. Lilvia is a member of the art collective We Are You Project International (www.weareyouproject.org). You can read some of her works at www.lilviasoto.com.

Carmen Amato Tejeda

Carmen Amato Tejeda has a PhD in Hispanic American Literature from Arizona State University. In 1993 she took a Diploma in Latin American Literature and Literary Criticism in Spanish at the UACJ, which motivated her to continue with a Master's Degree in Literary Creation at the University of Texas at El Paso. This decision leads her to change the course of her professional activities to dedicate herself fully to literature. Tejeda has published 8 collections of poems and a timeless agenda: Ahora somos el silencio (Today we are the silence) (1992), Ciudad que se restaura (City that is restored) (1994), El silencio que se hiela en la blancura de las hojas (The silence that freezes in the whiteness of the leaves) (1997), El silencio de lo que cae (The silence of what falls) (Co-authored, 2000 ), Gestación de la luz (Gestation of light) (2006), Estación Tempe (Tempe Station) (2010), Soy todo lo que vuela (I am everything that flies) (2011), Bitácora de la lluvia (Rain Log) (2015), Asfalturas (Asphalts. The agenda.) (2016). She has participated in literary meetings and congresses in various parts of Mexico, as well as in Costa Rica, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Brazil. She is currently the coordinator of the collective Indagaciones Poéticas and a founding member of the cultural company INTELECTA.