Description
Sonia Manzano Vela is one of Ecuador's foremost feminist poets and fiction writers. She has published twelve poetry collections and four novels. Translations of her poems into English have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Evansville Review, Ezra, Lake Effect, Latin American Literature Today, Loch Raven Review, Metamorphoses, Per Contra, Persimmon Tree, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and World Literature Today.
The poems in Last Return to Eden and Other Poems (2026) span Western literature, offering a critical appraisal or re-appraisal of the Western tradition, from Sappho to Walt Whitman and the Odyssey to contemporary cinema, in our much-flawed modern world, and how poetry can resist societal constraints in the pursuit of freedom.
Event co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish, the Eleanor Howard O'Leary Chair in French & Francophone Studies, the Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies Program, Creative Writing program and the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program.