Search

A Cuban poet and exile's recollections of his first twelve years (1948-1960) growing up in prerevolutionary Cuba.

The celebrated Cuban American poet and novelist delivers “[a] haunting love letter to New York . . . with tales of love, death, and exile” (Publishers Weekly). Pablo Medina’s Cubop City Blues fuses raw, passionate language and elegant lyricism to breathe life into a musically-disguised New York City shaped by jazz masters, refugees, and storytellers. Our guide into Cubop City is the Storyteller, born nearly blind and shrouded in his mother’s guilt. He’s homeschooled inside his parents’ crumbling apartment with a European housekeeper, and educated through Encyclopedia Britannica, the Bible, and One Thousand and One Nights. When he’s twenty-five, his mother and father are both diagnosed with cancer, and the Storyteller alone is left to care for them. He does so by telling them stories conceived from the prolific reading that allowed his imagination to flourish despite little contact with the outside world. Through his tales—full of magic, sorrow, longing, love—Cubop City surges colorfully to life. Moving through myriad points of view, the Storyteller imagines a world populated by both well-known figures like Chano Pozo and Jelly Roll Morton, and invented characters, most notably a mustachioed man who is stabbed by a stranger and embarks on a novel-long search for his attacker. Molded in the cadence of Afro-Cuban jazz, Cubop City Blues is a symphonic portrait of a bustling urban landscape and the intimate lives that give a city its voice. “A kaleidoscopic depiction of life in exile.” —Leonard Lopate “[Medina’s] most touching novel to date . . . A rich and stunning novel with an incredibly intricate scaffolding . . . Yet another triumph.” —Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Review of Books

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Pablo Medina's poems belong to the real world even while they move across the borders of dreams and wild imagination. They sustain a tone that's both sophisticated and innocent, delivering fresh news of what it feels like to be alive and human. I love these poems for their music and vivid imagery. I love their clarity, whether evoking city or bull pasture or bedroom, or an interior landscape. I love following the poet's surprising thought, as he delves into the heart and the mind and the world" Joan Larkin."

Sent to America from his native Caribbean island nation of Barata as a young boy, Felix Nogara wanders from place to place, unable to assimilate, until the dictator who had ruled Barata dies and Felix returns home to find his mother and to reclaim the culture and history of his native land.

Master storyteller Pablo Medina's The Cigar Roller is a radiant novel recounting the life of Cuban master cigar roller Amadeo Terra. A proud and capricious man, tobacco has been the center of Amadeo's life, the source of his passion. For his considerable talents with the leaves he had been forgiven a great number of sins. An imperious patriarch of enormous appetites, Amadeo now lies in a Florida hospital after a stroke looks back at his previously unexamined life. One day Nurse feeds him mango from a baby-food jar-a change from the tasteless mush he frequently rejects with defiance-and the taste brings memories of his life in Havana flooding back to him. He recalls his turbulent, passionate relationship with his wife Julia, his numerous romantic transgressions, the three sons he's kept at a distance, the political strife that forced his family to relocate from Cuba to Florida, and finally the tragedy that he's kept locked away. The Cigar Roller is a tour de force, an evocative, humorous and endearing and portrait of a once robust man who, at the end of his imperfect life, clamors for some dignity and grace as he comes to terms with his regrets.

Pablo Medina These poems resonate of paradise, be it imagined, remembered, found, or lost. From simplicity of nocturnes singing of "a nostalgia for what never was" to the complexity of boleros speaking in three languages-love, hope, and betrayal-these poems show us a gifted poet who has grafted the Latin sensibilities of his youth onto an international sense of imagery, rhythm, and vision.

Chronicles the life of Felicia Turner and the men in her family, forced to escape from a Caribbean island because of political turmoil and trying to cope with life in the North

Eight acclaimed writers from New England and four faculty members from Worcester State University offer reflective essays on signature works in the Worcester Art Museum from antiquity to the present. Contributors include Lauren K. Alleyne, Erika L. Briesacher, Lawrence Buell, Gish Jen, Kirun Kapur, Megan Marshall, Pablo Medina, Lloyd Schwartz, Heather Treseler, Anthony Walton, Kristin Waters, and Karl R. Wurst. The book is prefaced by Barry M. Maloney, President of Worcester State University, and Matthias Waschek, the Jean and Myles McDonough Director of the Worcester Art Museum, and is sponsored by Worcester State University, the Worcester Art Museum, and individuals committed to supporting public education and the arts. The essays offer historical, personal, and biographical perspectives on some of the most celebrated works in the Worcester Art Museum's collections as well as ways in which these works are incorporated into collegiate teaching and research by faculty at Worcester State University. The book serves as a sampler introduction to the Worcester Art Museum's extensive collections and appeals to the seasoned connoisseur, the general reader, and faculty interested in incorporating the arts in their teaching.

'West of Sex' uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide a coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality and a look at sexual identity in the borderlands.