The award-winning Colombian poet Andrea Cote in Athens and Thessaloniki

The Colombian poet and professor at the University of Texas, Andrea Cote, invited by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Lea Festival, the 12th Athens International Poetry Festival, and the Honorary Consulate General of Colombia, will visit Athens and Thessaloniki to present her new poetry collection Dear Beth, recently published by Ikaros Publishing in a translation by Konstantinos Palaiologos.

Athens
Wednesday, September 30 at 19:30 Little Tree Bookstore (2 Kavalloti St, Koukaki)
The book will be discussed by poet Andrea Cote, translator Laura Salas, and the collection's translator Konstantinos Palaiologos.

Thessaloniki
Friday, October 2 at 20:00 Konstantinidis Bookstore (92 Mitropoleos St, Thessaloniki 546 22)
The book will be discussed by poet Andrea Cote and the collection's translator Konstantinos Palaiologos.

About the Poet

Andrea Cote (Colombia, 1981) is one of the most distinguished voices in Latin American poetry and prose. She studied Literature at the University of the Andes and received her PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published four poetry collections and two works of prose. Dear Beth earned her the 24th Casa de América de Poesía Americana Award. Her poems have been translated into English, German, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Macedonian, Arabic, Polish, Greek, Russian, and Chinese. She lives in the US and teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.

About the Book

Dear Beth,
in a story like this one, the characters are
fewer and fewer.
Do you remember all that time we spent together
when with our words we brought order to oblivion?
The list of our losses has grown so large
that it is now a language in its own right.

In the book, Andrea Cote explores spiritual desolation with irony, tenderness, and raw realism: the life of the immigrant, searching for an unfulfilled promise. Through epistolary forms, the rigid language of advertising, and a dark lyricism, her poems give voice to dreams, anger, melancholy, and the paradox of return, which confirms that life is always elsewhere.