José Martí enters the Hall of Fame of Writers of New York

June 12, 2018

The Cuban poet, essayist, journalist and politician José Martí (1853-1895) has been named a new member of the New York Writers Hall of Fame, as announced last May by the Empire State Center for the Book.

The Cuban Apostle is the second Hispanic writer to enter such an exclusive hall, following Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos in 2011.

The proposal has been promoted in recent times by Esther Allen, scholar and translator of Martí, as well as by Cuban-American historian Ada Ferrer, of New York University.

The entry into the select New York group was finalized during a ceremony in which Ferrer herself and Lisandro Pérez, a Cuban-American sociologist and professor at John Jay College, gave remarks on the occasion of the inclusion.

The New York Writers Hall of Fame is a project of the Empire State Center for the Book that annually grants memberships to several writers, living or deceased, who have marked the cultural history of that great city.

Some of the most celebrated members are Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, Washington Irving and Henry James, Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Mary McCarthy, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, among others.

This year, along with José Martí, five other writers were inducted, two of them also deceased: Ira Gershwin (1896-1983), American lyricist, who created many of the most beloved songs of the USA together with his brother George Gershwin, and E.L. Konigsburg (1930-2013), author of children's books.

The other three authors are historian and journalist Russell Shorto (1959), Colson Whitehead (1969), novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize, and Jacqueline Woodson (1963), currently USA Ambassador for Literature for Young People.

Source: CubaDebate