Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe — Reading Group #7
I can show you baby enough love to break your heart forever
with Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro

Sunday November 1, 2020
19:00–21:00 (CET)

This Sunday, the final segment of the book will be read by its editor, the poet and translator Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro. It includes a keynote entitled “Dream of Europe” delivered by Lorde at a writers’ conference at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 1988. The title for this final reading group is chosen from Castro’s lucid afterword: a quote from the poem “Song for Baby-O, Unborn” by Diane di Prima, who passed away last Sunday and who was first to publish Audre Lorde’s writing (Audre Lorde’s book The First Cities was published by Diane di Prima's Poets Press in 1968).

Mayra A. Rodriquez Castro is a Colombian poet and translator and currently also a lecturer at Naropa University in Colorado, where she is completing her Masters in Poetics as the 2019 recipient of the Ann Waldman Fellowship. In 2017 she was awarded the John F. Kennedy Research Grant that enabled her work with Audre Lorde’s archives at the Freie Universität Berlin and that led to the publication of Dream of Europe with Kenning Editions earlier this year. Interviewed about her book by Maria Theresia Starzmann of Social Text, she clarifies: “Dream of Europe grew from a love of poetry—poetry not only as a form of diction, but a tool for understanding, naming, and organising experience. The selections in the book were included upon this premise. The book is composed of interviews, readings, and university seminars (fully transcribed from audio), as well as further documents. You use the word appraisal, a term that circulates widely in archival contexts to imply assessments of value. But I was more interested in resisting preconceived notions of Audre Lorde, that is, in resisting adulations”.