Bio Denise León
My name is Denise León. I was born in Tucumán, Argentina, in 1974. I´m a descendant of Sephardic immigrants. I have published Poemas de Estambul (Poems from Istanbul) Alción, 2008; El trayecto de la herida (The path of the wound) Alción, 2011; El saco de Douglas (The sack of Douglas) Paradiso, 2011; Templo de pescadores (Temple of fishermen) Alción, 2013; Sala de espera (Waiting room) elCRUCEcartonero, 2013; Poemas de Middlebury (Poemas from Middlebury) Huesos de Jibia, 2014, Mesa de pájaros (Table for birds) Bajo la luna, 2019 and Árbol que tiembla, (Trembling tree) la ballesta magnífica, 2022. I have participated in several international poetry festivals such as Rosario (2009), Córdoba (2014), Mendoza (2014), Federal Word Festival (2015) and International Poetry Festival of Buenos Aires (2015). My poems have been included in various anthologies such as Por mi boka (Lumen, 2013) and Penúltimos. 33 poets from Argentina 1965-1985 (UNAM 2015), and translated into English and Portuguese. I have a PHD in Latin American Literature and work as a Researcher at CONICET (Council for Scientific and Technical Research). I currently teach in the chairs of Latin American Literature at the National University of Salta and in Communication Theorys II at the National University of Tucumán, Argentina.
My last book, Árbol que tiembla is a text that tries to rebuild the paths of genealogy from memories and stories of the survivors of four Sephardic families who came to settle in Tucumán at the beginning of the 20th century. “The universe is made of stories, not atoms”, says a verse by Muriel Rukeyser. Precisely that became clear when, through the pandemic, we celebrated in July 2021 the hundred years of the Sephardic Society of Tucumán. Forty-two Jews – among whom were the two older brothers of my grandfather Benjamín León – laid the first stone of the building in 1921. My book intends to recover and honor stories like that. The stories but also the lives of the Sephardic families who crossed the ocean to settle in this city. Families that, for the most part, come from a single city in Turkey, Izmir, where the Greek poet Homer was born, and who carried out their own versions of the Odyssey.
The writing and research project that I undertook during the pandemic and that culminated in the publication of Árbol que tiembla, led me to get involved with my own family memories but also with diverse materials such as photographs, film material, marriage certificates in Hebrew and Spanish, death certificates, birth certificates, objects, postcards written in solitreo and other documents linked to the daily life of the Sephardic Jewish community of Tucumán. As the investigation progressed, an accumulation of materials was generated that overflowed writing: a kind of indecipherable and chaotic pile but with an enormous power of evocation where it seems possible to read community dynamics of memory in my province and the particularities of the Sephardic Jewish immigration processes in northern Argentina.