Pedro Larrea

Pedro Larrea (Spain, 1981) is the author of three books of poems: "The Wizard's Manuscript," "The Free Shore," and "The Tribe and the Flame." His poetry has been featured in, among others, the prestigious Spanish journal "Revista de Occidente." He has read as a guest poet in venues such as the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the New York Public Library, New York University, Emory University, the University of Kentucky, the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site, the International Poetry Festival of Granada (Spain), the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá,Colombia) and elsewhere. As an essayist, he has authored the scholarly study "Federico García Lorca in Buenos Aires" (2015). As a translator, he has published the Spanish edition of Kevin Young’s "Book of Hours" ("Libro de horas," Valparaíso, 2018). He received his MA and PhD in Spanish from the University of Virginia after graduating in literary theory and comparative literature from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Lynchburg, in Virginia, and tours nationally and internationally performing his poetry.

Of Pedro Larrea's work, Spanish poet and visual artist Juan Carlos Mestre has said: "His poetics have given us a body of work in permanent transformation, challenging in its critical density, conceptually rigorous, and lucid in its emotional insight. His work has thus already become an indispensable point of reference for contemporary Spanish lyric. His plumbing of subjective experience captures in the pulsing wonder of language, in the textual object, and in the creative imagination a discursive tension of new resonances, of innovative forms and radiating senses; his is a wise appraisal of humanity and the semantic atmosphere of its world, words to build an ethical shelter for truth and for analogical thinking, linking consciousness to the unveiling of another more intense beauty, an aesthetic diction in unflagging flight from habit, a voice as cultivated as it is impassioned in its formal conduct, a text open to the future’s expanding horizons of meaning."