How is poetry a way of inhabiting the present? What do poets do with time? How does poetry bear witness? How does poetry differ from storytelling, from what it tells and how it counts? How is the poem a barometer of its time? Thinking through motherhood and extinction, deep time, tale and poem, debt and gift, I will try to answer some of these questions and talk about how the poem organizes time.

Dr. Mara Pastor (Puerto Rico, 1981) is author of over 12 poetry collections. She won in 2020 the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets for poetry written in bilingual format (Spanish/English) in the US for her poetry collection, Deuda Natal / Natal Debt (U of Arizona Press, 2021, translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong). Among many other awards, in 2022 she won the “Letras Boricuas” award for Puerto Rican writers sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and Fundación Flamboyán. One of Pastor’s most influential poetry collections, Poemas para fomentar el turismo (2012), was recently reedited in commemorative edition in 2022. Her most recent poetry book is Las horas extra (Puerto Rico: La Impresora, 2022 / Argentina: Las Perlas Rojas, 2024). She is Associate Professor and directs the program of Creative Writing in Spanish at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico.