A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales

“A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales” has been announced as the second plenary to be presented at The 3rd Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2022) and The 3rd Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC2022).

Writer Silvia Cuevas-Morales has been an activist on many fronts and outstanding on the feminist front in Spain, an advocate for human rights, social, judicial, and sexual rights. She found in poetry the voice through which to express her criticism of a humanity at odds with itself, her indignation at sexual, political and social injustice, her anger at all kinds of abuse, at racism. This conversation will take us through some of Silvia’s work and, most importantly, will allow us to meet the passionate human behind the words.

The BCE/BAMC2022 Organising Committee is currently calling for papers to be presented. Please submit your abstracts by July 5, 2022.

To participate in BCE/BAMC2022 as an audience member, please register for the conference.

This plenary will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.



Abstract

A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales

It would not be an untruth to say that Silvia was born into resistance. In 1975, at the age of thirteen, she and her parents had to flee Pinochet’s Chile to take up residence in Australia. It is true, however, that Silvia has spent all of her adult life in “resistance mode”. She has been an activist on many fronts and outstanding on the feminist front in Spain, an advocate for human rights, social, judicial, and sexual rights. The list is long. If you are looking to find her, search in the trenches of resistance!

Silvia found in poetry the voice through which to express her criticism of a humanity at odds with itself, her indignation at sexual, political and social injustice, her anger at all kinds of abuse, at racism. She voices, in Spanish or in English, what is so often silenced in our society, forcing her reader to travel with her through dark, shadowed streets, and is implacable in her search for a better world.

This conversation will take us through some of Silvia’s work and, most importantly, will allow us to meet the passionate human behind the words.


Speaker Biography

Silvia Cuevas-Morales
Writer, Australia

Silvia Cuevas-MoralesSilvia Cuevas-Morales is a bilingual Australian writer of Chilean descent whose work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. After the 1973 military Coup d’état in Chile, her family was forced to flee the country and settled in Australia, where she completed her secondary and university studies, while teaching Latin American literature and Spanish language at La Trobe and Monash Universities. In 1999, she moved to Spain, where she has worked in the publishing world as an editor and literary translator, as well as collaborating with different newspapers and magazines as a freelance journalist.

Some of her published work includes: Purple Temptations (1994); Respiro de arena (1996); Sur/South Poem(a)s (1998); Al filo de la memoria/At memory's edge (2001); Canto a Némesis (2003); De la "A" a la "Z": Diccionario universal de autoras que escriben en castellano (2003); Vínculos Teatrales (2003); Rodaré maldiciendo (2008); Poliamora (2010); Diccionario de centenarias ilustres: 100 mujeres que cambiaron la historia (2011); Desarrelament y altres poemes / Desarraigo y otros poemas (2012); Nanas lésbicas: para conciliar el sueño (2013) Pienso, luego estorbo... / Je pense, donc je gȇne... (2014); El tren del miedo y otros relatos (2015) and Apátrida: Diario de un destierro/ Stateless: Diary of an Exile (2017).


Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Professor-Emerita-Sue-BallynDr Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25th 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.



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