Join us for an evening of poetry and dialogue with acclaimed Colombian poet Andrea Cote Botero, winner of the XXIV Casa de América Prize for American Poetry. The event will feature a reading from her latest collection, Querida Beth, followed by a conversation on poetry, migration, and memory.

About the Poet

Andrea Cote Botero (b. 1981, Barrancabermeja, Colombia) is the author of several poetry collections, including Puerto Calcinado (2003), Cosas Frágiles (2008), La Ruina que Nombro (2015), En las Praderas del Fin del Mundo (2019), and Fervor de Tierra (2024). Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has received numerous international accolades, including the National Poetry Prize from Universidad Externado de Colombia, the Puentes de Struga International Poetry Prize, and the Città di Castrovillari Prize for the Italian edition of Puerto Calcinado. She is also the author of prose works such as A Nude Photographer: A Biography of Tina Modotti and Blanca Varela or Writing from Solitude, and has translated poets including Khalil Gibran, Tracy K. Smith, and Jericho Brown into Spanish. Andrea Cote Botero currently teaches Creative Writing in the Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso 

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About Querida Beth

Winner of the 2024 Casa de América Prize, Querida Beth is a poignant and stylistically rich collection that tells the story of a Colombian woman’s journey as a migrant in the United States. The jury praised the book for its “precise and moving poetry, continuous stylistic discoveries, and a fiercely contemporary tone.” Cote Botero describes the work as an effort to restore the memory of a woman whose name and legacy slowly disappeared in migration, using poetry as a means of healing and remembrance.