This event has been cancelled
Due to a family emergency, our event with Alberto Ríos has been cancelled.
An Evening with Alberto Ríos
Grace Lutheran Church is pleased to host one of the country's preeminent writers, Alberto Ríos, Poet Laureate of Arizona, for an evening of poetry and conversation.
On Friday, March 4 in a unique open forum, Alberto Ríos will read selections from his many published works and share stories of his Chicano heritage, reflections of a life that began in Nogales, Arizona.
"Ríos's poetry is a kind of magical storytelling, and his stories are a kind of magical poetry," commented Jose David Saldivar in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ríos grew up in a Spanish-speaking family but was forced to speak English in school, leading him to develop a third language, "one that was all our own," as he described it. Ríos once commented, "I have been around other languages all my life, particularly Spanish, and have too often thought of the act of translation as simply giving something two names. But it is not so, not at all. Rather than filling out, a second name for something pushes it forward, forward and backward, and gives it another life."
Alberto Álvaro Ríos is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. His books of poems include The Dangerous Shirt, preceded by The Theater of Night, winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, along with The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a finalist for the National Book Award, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five Indiscretions, and Whispering to Fool the Wind. His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border—called Capirotada—won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award and was designated as the One Book Arizona choice for 2009.
Ríos is the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as over 250 other national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.
Ríos earned a BA and MFA from the University of Arizona, and he teaches at Arizona State University. In 2013 Ríos was named the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona. In 2014, Ríos was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
This Phoenix First Friday event will be in the Sanctuary at Grace Lutheran Church, 1124 North Third Street in Phoenix, at 7:00pm on Friday, March 4.
The event is free of charge, all are welcome!