Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 2pm Hartford Public Library
                                                                                      The Connecticut Center for the Book Awards Ceremony
                                                     Award for Lifetime Achievement in Service to the Literary Community to Bessy Reyna

                                                              In March 2009 Bessy received the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education's
                                                                              Outstanding Latina in the Literary Arts and Publications Award


                   POET
            Select here to listen to Bessy read two poems
BESSY REYNA
She Remembers
“The poems in Bessy Reyna’s She Remembers are easy to
access  but hard to forget. And to hear her perform her work
is to be first transported, then transformed.”
Wally Lamb


The Battlefield of Your Body
“Like Panama, the country of her childhood, Bessy Reyna’s
poems provide a channel, a way to bridge east and west by
reconciling the warring needs of the body, the mind and the
heart.  Whether Reyna is dancing with a stalk of sugar cane
in Hartford, Connecticut, or in her birthplace of Cuba, poem
after poem is as lively as a salsa. Like chewing sugar cane,
her poems ultimately reward with their hard-won sweetness,
with the taste that leaves us wanting more.”
Vivian Shipley