Gloria Posada

In 1992 she won the National Young Poetry Award of the Colombian Institute of Culture with her book Oficio divino (Divine Office). In 1991 she won second prize in the Carlos Castro Saavedra National Poetry Award, and in 1990 she was shortlisted for the Eduardo Cote Lamus National Poetry Award with Vosotras (You Women). Naturalezas (Natures) won a Honorable Mention in the Casa de las Américas Hispano-American Poetry Award (Havana, Cuba) in 2002. These prize-winning collections were later published. In 2002, she also won the Individual Creation Scholarship of the Colombian Ministry of Culture for her Lugares (Places) project. In 2004, she was granted the Colombia-Mexico artistic residence and the FONCA/CONALCULTA award of Mexico.

Since the late 1980s, Gloria Posada has devoted herself to an enquiry into nature and the world, which manifests itself sometimes in words and sometimes in images or shapes. In her quest, poetry and plastic arts have had a parallel development, which occasionally involves installations, sound art or interventions of public space.

Of her literary work, Peruvian critic Julio Ortega says:

“The poetry of Gloria Posada takes place in the intimacy of language brought to us by emotion. For that reason, one evokes her as the tender and discrete tone of a familiar voice. It is a voice drawn on transparent water, which, before disappearing, reveals to us the brief trance of contemplation. Hence her ability to articulate and make legible the emotional design of its recovery. It’s a poetry of empathy syntax, one that makes affections speak. Thus, it gives us back the Word”.

In Posada’s collections, there is reflection on the sacred and mortality, on history and the collective imagery about the feminine and its archetypes, and an exploration of the past and present of personal history. Her latest collection shows earth, air and fire as basic elements of the world, creation and the body.

An overview of the features of her work is given by Colombian poet Elkin Restrepo:

“Among other virtues, the poems of Gloria Posada boast those of beauty and precision, not turning into rhetoric what can only be said in one way. To transform her flesh into verb, as she says in an unforgettable line, has been her mission. A verb which undoubtedly the reader transforms into flesh”.

In other unpublished books, begun several years, and even decades, ago, the author addresses war, absence, love, loss, place and the city, drawing on different situations, symbols and landscapes which nourish her writing. Select bibliography

Oficio Divino, Colcultura, Bogotá, 1993
Vosotras, Colección Autores Antioqueños, Medellín, 1993
La cicatriz del nacimiento, Medellín, Ojo Editorial, 2000
Naturalezas, Ediciones Sin Nombre, México, 2006

Links 
International Encounter of Contemporary Plastic Artist, Medellín, 2007  Brief note about and critique of Gloria Posada’s work, with photos (in Spanish).