R192. El Niño as the “Man of the House": Latinx Poets Who Immigrated as Boys

Room 211, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 5, 2020
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm

 

Immigrating as boys from El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua to the US through varying sets of circumstances, each of these poets learned the meaning of “being the man of the house,” a common saying in Latin America as they transitioned into a new land. Their poetry captures the challenges of internalizing the expectation of acting like an adult, at times being forced to play the role of a patriarch and at other times expected to conform to being a young, disempowered child.


Outline & Supplemental Documents

Event Outline: Event_Outline.pdf

Participants

Moderator:

Jose B. Gonzalez is the author of Toys Made of Rock and When Love Was Reels; he is the co-editor of Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature. His poetry has been anthologized in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The Wandering Song, and Theatre Under my Skin.

León Salvatierra is the author of Al Norte. In 2014, he received a PhD in Hispanic languages and literatures from University of California, Berkeley. His poetry has been published in Poetry, The Notre Dame Review, and The Wondering Song. León is a second-year poet in the creative writing MFA program at UC Davis.

Javier O. Huerta is the author of the groundbreaking Some Clarifications y otros poemas and the cult classic American Copia. He earned his MFA from the Bilingual Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Roy G. Guzmán is pursuing a PhD in cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, where they also received an MFA in creative writing. They are a 2019 NEA fellow and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

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