Éric Morales-Franceschini, associate professor of English and Latin American and Caribbean studies in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, will discuss and read selections from his new poetry collection Syndrome, published in January 2024 by Anhinga Press after being selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry.

Morales-Franceschini's chapbook Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound, 2021) was awarded the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and his poems have appeared in Moko, Somos en escrito, Chiricú, Witness, Dryland, Acentos Review, Kweli, Berkeley Poetry Review, Bodega, Matter, Muzzle, sx salon and reviews at Newfound, Tropics of Meta, The Rumpus, Boston Review, and AGNI.

Morales-Franceschini's scholarly research specializes in postcolonial theory and criticism, decolonial aesthetics, Marxist critical theory, Caribbean and Latinx literary and cultural studies, and radical thought in the Américas. 

In December 2023, he was named the winner of the Modern Language Association of America's thirty-third annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures, for his book The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation, published by the University of Virginia Press.

This event is presented by the department of English,the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the UGA Humanities Council as part of the UGA Humanities Festival.