by Nidia Hernández

Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!

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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Nidia Hernández, Saturday, 11/23/2024, 4:30 pm, Room 8303

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A clock pointed
toward the place
where an incandescent ring
touched the shadows

it was my room
floating in the night

my room
defending me from myself

my dark room
where I hide
the pyramids I dream

it was the space of a second
to be everywhere

to reach you

to touch you

to hear your voice

it was unreality
my true room

inmense unreality
my only home

*

Un reloj apuntaba
hacia el lugar
donde un aro incandescente
tocaba las sombras

era mi cuarto
que flotaba en la noche

mi cuarto
defendiéndome de mí misma

mi cuarto oscuro
donde escondo
las pirámides que sueño

era mi cuarto de segundo
para estar en todas partes

para llegar a ti

para tocarte

para oír tu voz

era la irrealidad
mi verdadero cuarto

la inmensa irrealidad

mi único hogar

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Venezuelan native Nidia Hernández has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project lamajadesnuda.com--the digital backup of a radio program (also called La Maja Desnuda) from the last 35 years and a collection of the best poets from around the world--won the 2011 world Summit Awards. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM Spain. In Boston, Nidia is an associate editor of ArrowsmithPress, and through them also curates Poesiaudio, a collection of Latin American poetry in English and Spanish, in which one can hear the voices of Latin American poets themselves, and belongs to the Board of Directors of The New England Poetry Club. Hernández is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light, an anthology by Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, which includes translations by Robert Pinsky, Sophie Cabot Black, Carolyn Forché, Shara McCallum, and Forrest Gander. Nidia Hernández was awarded a 2021 Certificate of Recognition “for her exemplary leadership in support of English language training for immigrants in the city of Boston.” In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, for which she which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award. The Farewell Light (Arrowsmith Press, 2024) is her most recent collection of poems.

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"Home" / "Hogar" appears in The Farewell Light (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). Permission granted by the poet.

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