Project Created: “Mi Voca Su Voca”
"Mi Voca Su Voca" was produced by the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.
World Premiere: April 20 – 22, 2016
Bio: Edwin Torres is a ‘lingualisualist’ rooted in the languages of sight and sound. A native of New York City, he currently lives in Beacon, NY. His poetic birth came via The Nuyorican Poets Café as mid-wifed by The St. Marks Poetry Project. He toured worldwide as a member of the groundbreaking poetry collective "Nuyorican Poets Café Live" that helped revitalize Spoken Word in the early 90's. His books include Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books), The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), In The Function Of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books), The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (Roof), and I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said (chapbook). He’s received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performing Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Poetry Fund among others. His visual poetics have been exhibited at Exit Art, EFA Gallery in NYC, and a graphic retrospective “Poesís: The Visual Language of Edwin Torres” at The Center for Book and Paper Arts, Chicago, Il. Anthologies include; Aloud; Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café (Hoyt), Best American Poetry, Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2 (Norton), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics Vol. 2 (Wesleyan Press), The Concise Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present, 2nd Edition (Cenguage Learning), Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion: A Coney Island Reader (Columbia University Press), and Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems, Plays and Songs For Children (Black Radish Books). In the summer of 2013, he was invited by the DIA Arts Foundation to be a poet-in-residence at Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument in The Bronx. He's been a guest blogger on the Poetry Foundation’s website “Harriet” and continues to co-edit the poetry journal “Rattapallax,” now available as an iPad app. In 2014, he published his latest book from University of Arizona Press entitled Ameriscopia.
Project Description: Celebrated poet Edwin Torres integrated autobiographical poems alongside experimental pieces in a unique theatrical performance that crossed borders between poetry, identity, language and sound. With themes ranging from growing up Puerto Rican in New York City to fatherhood to his Nuyo-Futurist evolution, this one-man performance captured the transformative power of poetry to move us in fascinating ways.
Residency Public Sharing: 12/12/13