Cancellation Notice from Teatro Paraguas:
Dear Friends of Teatro Paraguas,
The UNM Irish Studies Dept. has canceled Paul Muldoon's visit to New Mexico in anticipation of UNM being closed next week due to the coronavirus recommendations made by our Governor.
Consequently — and unfortunately — Teatro Paraguas has decided to follow suit and cancel the March 22 reading.
We will be exploring ways to bring Paul to New Mexico in the future at a more propitious time. We hope that you will join us at that time.
Thank you very much for your understanding.
Best wishes and Happy Equinox!
Argos MacCallum
Artistic Director
Teatro Paraguas presents
An Evening of Prize-Winning Poetry
Paul Muldoon, Anna C. Martinez, and Jimmy Santiago Baca
Three prize-winning poets read from their respective works.
Information:
teatroparaguas.org
Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in Santa Fe County in 1952. Abandoned by his parents at the age of two, he lived with one of his grandmothers for several years before being placed in an orphanage. At the age of 13 he ran away and wound up living on the streets. When he was twenty-one he was convicted on charges of drug possession and incarcerated. He served six and a half years in prison, three of them in isolation.
During this time, Baca taught himself to read and write, and he began to compose poetry. A fellow inmate convinced him to submit some of his poems to the magazine Mother Jones, then edited by Denise Levertov, who helped Baca publish his first collection of poetry, Immigrants in Our Own Land (Louisiana State University Press) in 1979. In 1987, his semi-autobiographical minor epic in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, received the American Book Award for poetry, bringing Baca international acclaim and, in 1989, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature.
A self-styled “poet of the people,” Baca conducts writing workshops with children and adults at countless elementary, junior high and high schools, colleges, universities, reservations, barrio community centers, magenta ghettos, housing projects, correctional facilities, and prisons from coast to coast. In 2004 Baca started a non-profit organization, Cedar Tree, Inc., that supports these workshops through charitable donations.
Baca's poetry collections include C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans: Dream Boy's Story (Grove Press, 2002), Healing Earthquakes (2001), Set This Book on Fire (1999), In the Way of the Sun (1997), Black Mesa Poems (1995), Poems Taken from My Yard (1986), and What's Happening (1982). His “memoir,” A Place to Stand (2001), chronicles his troubled youth and the jail-stint that brought about his personal transformation.
Anna C. Martinez is a mother, grandmother, performance/competitive/slam poet, and civil rights attorney licensed in NM and Washington, D.C. Born in Los Angeles on Normandie Avenue at the height of its civil rights movements, Anna was then raised from school age in Española, NM and currently lives in Albuquerque. She was first published in 2014 in anthologies La Palabra: the Word is Woman, and Lowriting: Shots, Rides, and Stories from the Chicano Soul with artists such as Lalo Alcaraz and Gustavo Arellano, and has opened for poets such as Buddy Wakefield and internationally-renowned performance artist Guillermo Gomez Peña and La Pocha Nostra. Host of monthly poetry show Divinely Inspired and in-house poet at Las Pistoleras Instituto Cultural De Arte in Taos, NM, Anna has held titles as ABQ Chicano/a City Slam Champ, XXX Haiku City Champ, and 2019 City Slam Champ for, and executive council member of, team Mindwell Slam with whom she will compete in 2020 at the largest slam competition in the country: Southern Fried Poetry Slam. Anna is also on the board of directors for Burque Revolt Poetry Slam, LLC and opens her home for free to touring poets, housing 15 of them within the last two years. Anna is currently working on publishing her first book of poetry.
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for more than thirty years. He is the author of thirteen collections of poetry including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and Frolic and Detour (2019), as well as Selected Poems 1968-2014 (2016). Roger Rosenblatt, writing recently in The New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as “one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems — word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.”