I hope you'll join me for this upcoming IWWG Member Book Spotlight in the IWWG online Digital Village on Dec. 9 - note the time zone listed is ET, 1:30 p.m. I’m thrilled to host this truly international event featuring Francisca Esteve & Marlon Fick, co-editors of the newly published poetry anthology, Xeixa, by Tupelo Press, featuring 14 Catalan poets - join us for this compelling discussion and readings by two Catalan poets from the anthology who will join us on the call - Rosa Font Massot & Celia Sanchez-Mustich! Register here, even if you can't attend so that you will get the recording!

During the post-civil war era, General Francisco Franco’s fascist government forbade the people of Spain’s Catalonia region from speaking, reading, and writing in Catalan, a crime punishable by imprisonment or execution. Throughout these years, the work of Catalan poets could only be found via the underground. Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve traveled to meet each of the poets featured in this anthology, embarking on the long road of joy, pain, and friendship that is the work of translation. These fourteen poets, like fourteen blackbirds, provide keen angles of perception in beautiful and lyrical poetry, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes nostalgic, and always engaging, until now almost entirely unknown to U.S readers. TO LEARN MORE