Urayoán Noel is a writer, translator, and performer from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Noel is the author of ten books in English and Spanish, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014, winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award); the performance text EnUncIAdOr (2014); and the poetry collections Boringkén (2008, named a Book of the Year by El Nuevo Día), Hi-Density Politics (2010, a National Books Critics Circle Small Press Highlights selection), and Transversal (2021, named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library). Noel’s translations include no budu please by Wingston González and adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado. A Letras Boricuas fellow in poetry and the recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Center, Noel has been a finalist for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Poetry Series Paz Prize for Poetry, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Modern Language Association book prizes. An editorial advisor for Latino Poetry (Library of America), Noel has been both fellow and faculty at CantoMundo and the Macondo Writers Workshop and has performed internationally at Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art. Noel’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Beta-Local, Casa de los Contrafuertes, and Taller Boricua and has been published in The New York Times, Poetry, and Google Arts & Culture. A founding member of The Latinx Project at NYU and Editor-in-Chief of its digital publication Intervenxions, Noel currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies for NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish and previously taught at SUNY Albany and for Stetson University’s low-residency MFA program. Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and is currently completing Neural Sea, a hybrid lipogrammatic work engaging neurodivergence, disability, queerness, and displacement.
‘Welcome to the virtual coordinates of Urayoán Noel — Puerto Rican poet, performer, professor, and polemicist.
The moniker “stateless” refers to the poet’s flux between island and mainland, and between textual forms (print, body, web). Of course, it also alludes to the ultimate “statelessness” of identity, and to a poetics of unstatement by turns deterritorialized and dys/u/topian in its damaged/unmanageable bodies.
A stateless poetics is never quite incorporated, but always in corps orated, non-mono-aural, and attuned to modes of resistant lingurality. Keep them herd melodies, give us those unstated ones. Let others blog the slog, we’ll unfurl #unstatements in the digital fog.’
. . .
delighting and confounding the enlightened masses since 1976
[from the old site]