Hispanic Heritage Month 2024
Giannina Braschi launched Putinoika at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center on September 25, 2024, in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. Argentine poet and critic Lila Zemborain and Spanish literary critic Nuria Morgado introduced the book, followed by a reading from Braschi and a reception.
The New York event introduced readers to Braschi’s modern reimagining of The Bacchae—a tragicomic world populated by the Muses of Bacchus, the Agents of Pendejo, and the Putinas of Putin.
Watch the Putinoika Book Trailer
Watch the Putinoika book trailer on YouTube.
Created for the book’s 2024 publication, the trailer introduces the characters, imagery, and three-part structure of Putinoika.
“I entered through a window of the White House.
But I will get out through an escape door at Mar a Lago.”—Bacchus, Putinoika
About Putinoika
Putinoika is Giannina Braschi’s multigenre epic about frenzy and plague in the era of Putin and Trump. Inspired by ancient Greek tragedy, the book unfolds in three parts: “Palinode,” “Bacchae,” and “Putinoika.”
In a world submerged in collusion, delusion, and pollution, hope not only stands its ground but rises through exhilarating literary forms, poetic expressions, and renewed faith in creativity. Putinoika insists that poets, philosophers, and lovers can create on a scale greater than society’s capacity to destroy. If Waiting for Godot is a threnody of hope in the atomic age, Putinoika is the “Invictus” we did not know we were waiting for after the global pandemic.
Putinoika at NYU
- Event: Launch of Giannina Braschi’s Putinoika
- Date: Wednesday, September 25, 2024
- Time: 6:30–8:30 p.m.
- Venue: King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University
- Address: 53 Washington Square South, New York City
- Introductions: Lila Zemborain and Nuria Morgado
- Reading: Giannina Braschi
- Occasion: Hispanic Heritage Month 2024
The event opened Braschi’s Putinoika book tour and brought her contemporary response to Greek tragedy before an audience of readers, writers, scholars, and students in New York.
Lila Zemborain and Nuria Morgado
Lila Zemborain is an Argentine poet and critic who teaches at New York University, where she co-founded the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish and curates the KJCC Poetry Series. Her poetry collections include Guardianes del secreto, Malvas orquídeas del mar, El rumor de los bordes, and Materia blanda. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.
Nuria Morgado is a Spanish literary critic and scholar of contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. She has taught at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has served as director of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language.
Together, Zemborain and Morgado situated Putinoika within contemporary Spanish-language literature and introduced Braschi’s reading at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center.
Putinoika’s Publication Details
- Title: Putinoika
- Author: Giannina Braschi
- Publication: Brown Ink, an imprint of FlowerSong Press
- Year: 2024
- Brown Ink curator: Frederick Luis Aldama
- Illustrations: Rosaura Rodríguez and Omar Banuchi of Días Cómic
- Design: Roi du Lac
- Order: FlowerSong Press or independent and online booksellers
National Hispanic Heritage Month at NYU
Observed in the United States from September 15 through October 15, National Hispanic Heritage Month recognizes the histories, cultures, and contributions of Hispanic and Latino communities.
The 2024 launch of Putinoika celebrated a Puerto Rican writer whose work moves among Spanish, Spanglish, and English while dismantling boundaries between poetry, fiction, theater, philosophy, and political satire. At NYU, Braschi presented a new literary response to the global pandemic, authoritarianism, environmental destruction, and the political theater of the Trump-Putin era.
About Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is an award-winning poet, novelist, and radical thinker who writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English. Her books include the epic poem El imperio de los sueños/Empire of Dreams, the Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing!, the geopolitical tragicomedy United States of Banana, and the multigenre epic Putinoika.
Her writing has inspired adaptations in theater, chamber music, graphic novels, painting, photography, artist books, sculpture, short films, industrial design, and urban planning. Her life’s work is the subject of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer.
Braschi has received honors and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, PEN America, Cambio16, and the North American Academy of the Spanish Language.
Interviews, Reviews, and Resources
- More about Putinoika — GianninaBraschi.com
- Putinoika by Giannina Braschi — FlowerSong Press
- Review of Putinoika — Latin American Literature Today
- Review of Putinoika by Miguel-Ángel Zapata — Latino Book Review
