Printing Nueva York

Join us for a conversation on Printing Nueva York with author Kelley Krietz, presented in partnership with The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. This groundbreaking study maps the vibrant world of nineteenth-century Spanish-language print culture in New York, tracing networks of Cuban émigrés, political exiles, and Puerto Rican intellectuals who used newspapers, pamphlets, and literary journals to shape public discourse and assert self-representation. Through this lens, the book reveals an essential genealogy of Latinx media-making, diasporic connection, and cultural production that has long shaped the city’s intellectual and political life.  
 
This program is part of The Clemente’s broader Historias initiative, a multi-year citywide initiative that weaves scholarly research, oral histories, and cultural programming to re-center Latinx narratives in NYC.  
 
Using Printing Nueva York as a historical anchor, the conversation will reflect on the longer continuities of Latinx knowledge circulation in New York—from nineteenth-century print networks to contemporary digital humanities projects such as Nueva York Chronicles. Kelly will be joined by Alana Casanova-Burgess, host and producer of WNYC’s NPR podcast La Brega. 

This conversation is moderated by Monxo López, MCNY’s Curator of Community Histories with a special performance by Urayoán Noel, a writer, translator, and performer based in the Bronx who also is an Associate Professor of English, Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

About the Speakers: 

Kelley Kreitz is Professor of English at Pace University in New York City. Her research brings together Latinx studies, media studies, and US and Latin American literary studies and has appeared in American Literary History, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, English Language Notes, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among other journals. She leads the digital mapping project C19LatinoNYC.org and is the author of Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2026). She serves on the advisory board of the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.

Alana Casanova-Burgess is the host of the acclaimed bilingual narrative podcast La Brega from Futuro Studios. Previously, she was a producer for WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show and the Peabody award-winning national public radio show and podcast On the Media. She was also part of the team that won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for Tulsa Burning, a six-part podcast co-produced with The History Channel about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and history of racial violence in the U.S. Her work has also been recognized by the New York Press Club, the Livingston Award and the Women's Media Center. 

Urayoán Noel is a writer, translator, and performer from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Noel is the author of a dozen books in English and Spanish, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014, winner of the LASA Latinx Studies Section Book Award) and most recently the autobiographical prose work Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook (2025). Noel’s translations include no budu please by Wingston González, adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, and the forthcoming traslaciones/transfers by González, for which Noel received a Support for Artists grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. A Mellon/Flamboyán Letras Boricuas fellow in poetry and the recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Center, Noel has been a finalist for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Poetry Series Paz Prize for Poetry, and the Modern Language Association book prizes.  A board member of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center and its Historias program, Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and is currently completing Neural Sea, a hybrid lipogrammatic work engaging neurodivergence, disability, queerness, and displacement.

Dr. Monxo López, Curator of Community Histories (he/him/his) is a dedicated museum curator, urban thinker, educator, cartographer, and activist for environmental and urban justice in the South Bronx. Currently serving as the inaugural Curator of Community Histories at the Museum of the City of New York, he holds a PhD in political science from CUNY’s Graduate Center and an MA from Université Laval in Québec, Canada. Monxo is the curator or co-curator of several exhibitions at MCNY, including Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega, This Is New York, Puppets of New York, and Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate. His work at MCNY has been noted in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and other major publications.
Originally from Puerto Rico, Monxo now resides in Mott Haven, where he continues to engage with local communities to promote social equity and sustainability.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.