Date: Thursday 27 November 2025
Time: 16.00 - 17.30
Location: Boydell Recital Room, House 5, top floor, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free and all are welcome.
‘Oh, How Small it is to be a Child in this World: Writing Librettos on Family Separation’. A talk by Anna Deeny Morales (Georgetown University USA).
Anna Deeny Morales will speak about family separation, disappearance, and the recuperation of children in her libretto adaptations of the Cuban zarzuela Cecilia Valdés (1932) and the Spanish Verbena de la Paloma (1894). She will trace how this work in adaptation establishes a foundation for her original works, ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts (2022), Las Místicas de México (2024), and Home Come Home, a recent commission that she is currently developing as a Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow. Deeny Morales will consider the evolution of questions and goals along with the ethical and practical challenges embedded in writing a libretto.
Anna Deeny Morales is a US-based Latina writer who grew up between Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute. Her works in opera and poetry consider everyday family love and children; modes of empathy; patterns of political, religious, and legal violence; and strategies of disappearance. Her operas have been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Georgetown Americas Institute, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Recent works include Las Místicas de México, which debuted in 2024 with the IN Series and the Children’s Chorus of Washington. ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts, with music by Brian Arreola, debuted at the Kennedy Center in 2022 and was performed at Gala Hispanic Theater in 2024. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of Tala (1938) by Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral, she has translated poetry by Raúl Zurita, Nicanor Parra, and Amanda Berenguer, among others.
Deeny Morales received a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley; an MA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on Puerto Rican theater, from Dartmouth College; and a BA in English Literature with a minor in Piano Performance from Shepherd University. After college she studied theater and directing at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica, Silvio d'Amico, in Rome, Italy. A Fellow in the Humanities in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, her monograph, Other Solitudes: Essays on Consciousness and Poetry, is forthcoming in 2026.
For further information on this event please email Dr Nicole Grimes, Department of Music, School of Creative Arts, at nicole.grimes@tcd.ie