Celebrating Latinx Heritage Month: Denice Frohman Poetry Reading

About the Event

Join us as we culminate a month honoring Latinx Heritage with a special celebration: a powerful reading by Denice Frohman, a celebrated poet and performer whose work resonates with themes of identity, culture, and social justice. 

Following the reading, Frohman will be joined in conversation by Dr. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities, acclaimed scholar, filmmaker, and cultural critic. This dialogue will delve deeper into the themes explored in the reading and offer insights into the intersections of art, activism, and Latinx identity.

Reception to follow.

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Featuring

Denice Frohman 

Poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day (The Academy of American Poets), The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, she is developing her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. Her work explores the hierarchies of language, lineage, queerness, and the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. Frohman sees her poetry as a tool for social change, cultural preservation, and aims to subvert traditional notions of power and knowledge. As a queer Nuyorican, she is the daughter of Puerto Rican and Jewish parents. She also played professional basketball in Puerto Rico after college where she earned a four-year athletic scholarship, and earned her Master’s in Education from Drexel University.

In Conversation With 

Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where she is also the founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive and the Gallery at the Center. Among her books and publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (2017). Among her films are Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994),  Small City, Big Change (2013), and War for Guam (2015). For her work as a scholar and filmmaker, Negrón-Muntaner has received Ford, Truman, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships. In 2008, the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies. She is also recipient of the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University’s most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012) and the Latin American Studies Association’s Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award (2019). From 2016-2019, she served as the director of Unpayable Debt, a working group at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference that studied debt regimes in the world. She co-created “Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean” and launched Valor y Cambio, an art, digital storytelling and just economy project. 
 

Sponsored by

The Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, the Greater Caribbean Studies Program, Hispanic Institute, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Writing Program at the School of the Arts, and the Institute of Latin American Studies