CantoMundo Poetry Reading: Roberto Tejada, Aracelis Girmay

Award-winning poets Roberto Tejada and Aracelis Girmay read from their acclaimed poetry collections in the auditorium of the Student Activity Center on the University of Texas campus. Roberto Tejada and 12 CantoMundo poets will read their poems from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Friday, July 13, 2012. Aracelis Girmay and 12 CantoMundo poets will read their poems from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Saturday, July 14, 2012. The events are free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow each night.

This free event is hosted by CantoMundo, a national poetry workshop dedicated to supporting and developing Latina/o poetics. CantoMundo provides a space where Latina/o poets can nurture and enhance their poetics; lecture and learn about aspects of Latina/o poetics currently not being discussed by the mainstream publishers and critics; and network with peer poets to enrich and further disseminate Latina/o poetry. The Center for Mexican American Studies of the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Texas at Austin is the primary sponsor of CantoMundo.

Biographies

Roberto Tejada is the author of several poetry collections, including Mirrors for Gold (2006), Exposition Park (2010), and Full Foreground (2012). He founded and continues to co-edit the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He is the author, as well, of art histories that include, most recently, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009), and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009). He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008); and at the University of Texas, Austin (2008 – 2010). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs. Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. Tejada lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, for which she won the Isabella Gardner Award & was nominated for the NBCC Award. Originally from California, Girmay has taught community writing workshops with young people in California & New York for the last ten years. Girmay has also taught at Queens College and is currently on the faculty of Drew University’s low residency M.F.A. program & Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts.

For more information about the event, contact Celeste Mendoza at cmendoza@cantomundo.org or Deborah Paredez at paredez@austin.utexas.edu.