Joy Castro, Willa Cather Professor of English and ethnic studies, recently published a new volume of "Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West," a book of poetry by her grandfather, Feliciano Castro. The book was previously published in Spanish in 1918.
Working with translator and co-editor Rhi Johnson of Indiana University Bloomington, the project recovered the lost collection of poetry "Lágrimas y flores."
Castro and Johnson, together with an interdisciplinary panel of University of Nebraska–Lincoln historians, literary scholars and translators, will discuss the project in a public dialogue, "Politics, Romance, and a Lost Manuscript: Recovering the Secret History of Key West," at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 30 in the Sheldon Museum of Art. The event is free and open to the public.
Panelists include Katie Marya, James Garza, Laura Muñoz, Ingrid Robyn and Luis Othoniel Rosa, who are faculty members in the departments of English, history, and modern languages and literatures.
Feliciano Castro was a Cuban American lector, printer, and writer. Born in Galicia, raised in Havana, and educated in Rome, he left Cuba for Florida in 1916. In 1917, he made his home in Key West, where he worked as a lector (a loud-reader in a cigar factory), a political essayist, a printer and a newspaper editor until his death in 1982. "Lágrimas y flores" (Tears and Flowers), his volume of 96 original formal poems about Caribbean politics, exile, migration and romance, was first published in Spanish in Key West in 1918 and is now forthcoming in a bilingual, facing-page, annotated edition, "Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West," on Oct. 29 from the University Press of Florida.
Joy Castro and Johnson met at a National Endowment for the Humanities research institute at the University of Tampa in 2019 and worked for five years on the new edition, which includes a peer-reviewed critical introduction situating Feliciano Castro in his cultural context and explaining the political role of the decades-long anti-colonial Cuban émigré community in Key West, a period Castro brought to life in her 2023 historical novel, "One Brilliant Flame."
The new volume "Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West" has been featured at the Conference on Cuban and Cuban American Studies in Miami, at the annual meeting of the Florida Historical Society in Orlando, and at a special symposium at the University of Central Florida, "The Dawn of Latinx Creative Writing in Florida: Culture, Identity, and Community in Key West and Tampa." Professors at other institutions are already using the text in courses on Spanish language and Latinx culture.
The Sheldon event is co-sponsored by the departments of English and modern languages and literatures; the Institute for Ethnic Studies; the Latinx and Latin American Studies program; and MASA.
