In honor of our Artopia party on February 10, Cultist proudly presents "100 Creatives," where we feature Miami's cultural superheroes in random order. Have suggestions for future profiles? Email [email protected] with the whos and whys.
26. Yaddyra Peralta
"My ambition is for my poetry and fiction to exude the sweet muck of southwest Miami-Dade," says Yaddyra Peralta,a student in FIU's Creative Writing MFA program and a seriously busy poet. This month alone, she has worked at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival with Heather McHugh (2009 winner of the MacArthur Genius Award) and represented the Miami Poetry Collective (MPC), of which she is a founding member, at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
Peralta was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and raised in Hialeah.
This background plays a central role in her work. She says her verse is
inspired by Mesoamerican and South Florida native creation mythology as well as Miami's landscape. She traces her influences to the Surrealists as well as poets James Tate, Russell Edson,
and Dean Young. Peralta explains: "Its consciousness is informed by the unshakable but
whimsical sense of immigrant displacement."
a lighter note, Peralta is involved with MPC's "Poem Depot," a poetry-on-demand, pop-up shop that has become a regular feature of Wynwood's
Second Saturday Art Walk and has also made appearances at the Miami
Art Museum, public libraries, and Books & Books. She has been a
guest on WLRN's Under the Sun, and her work has been used by The Miami Art Museum and Wynwood's ArtLab33.
Poem Depot with David Svenson of the Miami Poetry Collective at the
2011 Sundance Film Festival. The Greater Convention & Visitor's
Bureau invited us to write poems at their "Miami Express Yourself"
lounge, which is promoting the city of Miami at the festival. They
wanted someone to represent the creative community in Miami, and I am
utterly delighted that they chose poets. It's exciting to know that we
were putting poetry in the hands of people who would not come into
contact with it otherwise. It also hit me, on our first day there, that
the work we were putting out was being disseminated to our broadest
audience ever. People come from all over to go to Sundance. So, I'm
picturing MPC poems in frames, as gifts, as bookmarks and travel flotsam
at the bottom of suitcases in LA, Manhattan, Sao Paolo. Material with
it's own life to be cherished or lost and maybe found again.
with my MFA at Florida International University. It's taken a while. I
am also a fiction writer and am looking for the right way to incorporate
both poetry and fiction in novel form. And Miami Squares.
It's Peter Borrebach's brainchild. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure
reading. Six poets, two poems each. The audience chooses the order and
who reads what.
What's something you don't want Miami to know about you?
Yes, I am from Hialeah. There, I said it. And I find you romantic, too, ciudad de factorias...
The Creatives so far:
27. Barron Sherer
28. Brigid Baker
29. Daniel Fila
30. McLaine Oberhellmann
31. Fro Rojas
32. Annie Hollingsworth
33. Preston Allen
34. Cristina Molina
35. David Josef Tamargo
36. Jillian Mayer
37. Alfonso Vega
38. Natasha Lopez de Victoria
39. Aholsniffsglue
40. Heather Maloney
41. Jorge Rubiera
42. Elaine Lancaster
43. Nick Duckart
44. Danielle Estefan
45. John Dufresne
46. Monica Lopez de Victoria
47. Bill Bilowit
48. Alette Simmons-Jimenez
49. Tawnie Silva
50. Ginger Bardot
51. Jonathan David Kane
52. Naomi Fisher
53. Rocky Grimes
54. Teresa Barcelo
55. Paul Tei
56. Lee Materazzi
58. Anna Mixon
59. Octavio Campos
60. P. Scott Cunningham
61. Elena Garcia
62. Summer Hill
63. Autumn Casey
64. Juan Navarro
65. Serge Toussaint
66. David Rohn
67. Diane Brache
68. Spencer Morin
69. James Anthony
70. Jim Drain
71. Claudia Calle
72. Kevin Arrow
73. Andrew Hevia
74. Ana Mendez
75. Michael McKeever
76. Diana Lozano
77. Ricardo Pau-Llosa
78. Agustina Woodgate
79. Tarell Alvin McCraney
80. Jennifer Kronenberg
81. Farley Aguilar
82. Colin Foord
83. Karelle Levy
84. Matt Gajewski
85. Antonia Wright
86. Allen Charles Klein
87. Christy Gast
88. Gustavo Matamoros
89. Shareen Rubiera-Sarwar
90. Kyle Trowbridge
91. Clifton Childree
92. Jessica Gross
93. Danny Brito
94. Nektar de Stagni
95. Anthony Spinello
96. Vanessa Garcia
97. Justin Long
98. Rosie Herrera
99. Rick Falcon
100. Ingrid B
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