october, 2024
Event Details
Join us for this stellar poetry reading featuring award-winning Texas poets Benjamin Garcia, Sebastian H. Páramo, Jake Skeets, and Joaquín Zihuatanejo at The Wild Detectives for an evening of poetry.
Benjamin Garcia is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry. His first collection, THROWN IN THE THROAT, was selected for the National Poetry Series, the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He worked for ten years as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. He is currently at work on a multimedia project exploring autism and ADHD. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/ AIDS.
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, American Book Award, and Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
Sebastian Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023) and was named a finalist for the 2023 Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. His work has received fellowships and support from the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at the University of Texas at Austin, CantoMundo, and other arts organizations. Sebastián received his MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas. He is the founding editor of The Boiler. He lives in Dallas and teaches writing at Southern Methodist University.
Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a Chicano/Latinx poet and award-winning teacher from Dallas, Texas. He received his BA in English from the University of North Texas and his MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Zihuatanejo is the author of Occupy Whiteness (Deep Vellum Books, 2024); Dollars for Scholars (CoolBooks Publishing, 2020); Arsonist (Anhinga Press, 2018), winner of the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry; Fight or Flight (CoolBooks Publishing 2016); Of Fire and Rain (Bonita Blvd Press, 2012), coauthored with Natasha Carrizosa; Family Tree (Bonita Blvd Press, 2010); Barrio Songs (Bonita Blvd Press 2008). In 2022, he was named the inaugural poet laureate of Dallas. The following year, Zihuatanejo received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
