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
How to feel kindly toward the tornado. Radar, 2023
Groundswell. Acentos, 2023
Borderspell. HAD, 2023
Aristotle for Dummies & Lead Ecology. HAD, 2022
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. Migration and Mutation—New Perspectives on the Sonnet in Translation, 2023. ISBN: 9781501380464
‘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as an assistant researcher for the University of Lisbon’s Centre for Theatre Studies (CET/FLUL), editing Pessoa’s unpublished English dramas.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).