Carlos Germán Belli & Pedro Lastra

Carlos Germán Belli was born in Lima, Peru to Italian parents in 1927. He earned his doctorate from the National University of San Marcos. He is known for his poetic oeuvre in which he combines the everyday Peruvian lexicon with the forms and styles of Spanish Golden Age and Renaissance poetry. His poetry books include Poemas (1958), ¡Oh Hada Cibernetica! (1962), Sextinas y otros poemas (1970), El buen mudar (1987), Trechos del Itinerario: 1958–1997 (1998), and Poemas escogidos / Selected Poems: 1958–2006 (2008). He has received Peru’s National Poetry Prize and two Guggenheim Foundation Awards for Poetry. He was awarded the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize by Chile’s National Council of Culture and the Arts in 2006, and he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2007.

Pedro Lastra (Chile, 1932) is a poet, essayist, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Stony Brook, and Honorary Professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru) and the Universidad de San Andrés (La Paz, Bolivia), as well as a member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua. He is one of the most outstanding members of the “Generation of 1950” in Chile and Latin America. Among many other verse collections, he has published Traslado a la mañana (1959), Y éramos inmortales (1969), Cuaderno de la doble vida (1984), Transparencias (2014), several editions of Noticias del extranjero, and countless anthologies in Latin America and Spain. His Poesía completa (2016) was recently released in Chile. He received the Premio Pedro Henríquez Ureña from the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua for his work and its impact on the Latin American poem and essay.