Carlos A. Pittella
I am a Latinx poet. Born & raised on the traditional lands of the Tupi, Guarani, & Goitacá (Rio de Janeiro), I live in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal with a pile of accents & expired passports, both Brazilian & Italian.
My writing is haunted by borders & bureaucracies. I also research neglected poetry archives & the performance of lyric selves.
recent poems {online}
The death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Frontier (Global Poetry Prize), 2023
from DANTE'S BUREAU, Omni Systems. GLYPHÖRIA, 2023
How to feel kindly toward the tornado. Radar, 2023
Groundswell. Acentos, 2023
Various borderpoems. HAD, 2022–2023
From the Latin biber. Moist, 2022
Deer family. FERAL, 2022
Your full name won’t fit the form. Tint, 2021
The analog who broke the camel’s lap-top. VS Podcast, 2020 [24:19]
prose on poetry
“Robert Frost never tried a Deep’n Delicious cake”: An Interview with Melanie Power. The Ex-Puritan, 2023. HTML
Fernando Pessoa’s sonnets—dislocations in form, persona and language. Bloomsbury, 2023. DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/2qkfj
‘We’ the people: collective lyric self in twenty-first-century poetry. Jacket2, 2022. HTML & DOI: 10.17613/h86j-bs19
"Marino," a tragedy, part 2 — More fragments and dramatis personae. Pessoa Plural, 2021. DOI: 10.26300/ndtv-jx55
Review of Safia Elhillo’s Home is Not a Country. Rain Taxi, 2022. HTML
Research papers available at ORCID, Google Scholar, & Humanities Commons
edited vols.
Headlight Anthology, no. 24. Concordia, 2023.
Jennings’s biography of Pessoa, The Poet with Many Faces. Tinta-da-China, 2019.
Pessoa’s Fausto (critical edition). Tinta-da-China, 2018.
Pessoa Plural, no. 8 (Special Jennings Issue). Brown/Andes/Warwick, 2015.
bionote
After a life in Portuguese, I studied English & Creative Writing at Concordia’s MA program, while RAing for SpokenWeb & co-editing Headlight Anthology. In 2020–2021, I worked as an assistant researcher for the University of Lisbon’s Centre for Theatre Studies (CET/FLUL), editing Pessoa’s unpublished English dramas. From 2016 to 2019, I was a postdoc associate at Brown, researching the Hubert Jennings papers & leading the Journals@BDR open-access pilot. In 2015-2016, as a CET/FLUL research fellow, I led the print & digital editions of Pessoa’s Fausto. Besides an MA in English/CreWri from Concordia (2023), I hold a PhD in Literary Studies from PUC-Rio, advised by Cleonice Berardinelli, with a thesis on Pessoa’s sonnets (2012). I also hold an MA in Literary Studies (2008) & a BA in Journalism (2005), both from PUC-Rio. I have been involved in transdisciplinary projects inside & outside academia, such as facilitating the creation of integrated curriculum (GCE Chicago Lab School) & coordinating a nonprofit dedicated to ecological education (the late One to Trees).
ps.
I may or may not hold the record of altitude ukulele with half gloves!
In 2014-2015, I tried to go from Portugal to India by land, which took 9 months & led me to Nepal instead. I visited the breathtaking Langtang region right before the 2015 earthquake, & fell in love with the Tibetan Mani Wall inscriptions, for which I would love to see a digital archive one day (the ukulele video was taken on the top of Kyanjin Ri 1).