Belén Rodríguez Mourelo

Langston Hughes’s I Wonder as I Wander has been a decisive book in my career. I read and analyzed this memoir in my doctoral thesis, African American Autobiography: A Study of Racial Identity (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). My admiration for Hughes’s narrative took me to his poetry, and this in turn to that of Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban poet. Since then, my life has been inextricably connected to the expression of identity and to Cuban letters. As I celebrate earning promotion to Professor, I would like to pay homage to the first work by Langston Hughes I encountered, which cemented my passion for literature and its transformative spell on the human spirit.