Abstract

Approach to Portuguese emigration literature with authors Darrell Kastin and Elizabeth Figueiredo Kastin, within the seminar «Poetics and citizenship» 'of the Doctoral Programme Discourses: Culture, History and Society (FLUC/FEUC/CES).

Bio notes

Darrell Kastin was born in Los Angeles, California, of Portuguese and Russian-Jewish descent. His maternal ancestors came from the Azores, settling in the United States at the end of World War II. He has spent considerable time on the islands over the years, using them as a setting for many of his short stories and novels. His debut novel, The Undiscovered Island, published in 2009, won the 2010 Silver IPPY Independent Publisher's Award for Multicultural Fiction. A collection of stories, The Conjurer and other Azorean Tales, was published in 2012 and it won the 2014 USA Best Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and the 2014 Global Ebook Award Silver Medal for both Short Stories/Fiction and Fiction/Multicultural. A new novel, Shadow Boxing with Bukowski, has just been published (May, 2016), and Kastin is currently working on a book titled A Tale of the Azorean Nights, a novel of interconnected stories, which is a sequel of sorts to The Undiscovered Island. Kastin is also a musician, and in 2011 he released a CD titled Mar Português/Portuguese Sea. The songs are poems by two of Portugal's finest poets, Florbela Espanca & Fernando Pessoa, which Kastin set to music.

Elizabeth Figueiredo Kastin born in Santa Maria, Azores, emigrated to the United States as a child with her family.Author of poems on the experience of emigration, published in some journals and anthologies of poetry including Vozes Submersas (Boston, 1990). Has collaborated in the blog "Comunidades" (RTP Azores).