Thursday, April 16
Rigoberto González/Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction
UConn Co-op, Storrs Center, 7:00 pm
The University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Program, in conjunction with the Aetna Chair of Writing and El Instituto, Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies, is pleased to announce the Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction with Rigoberto González. The reading will take place at the UConn Co-op in Storrs Center on Thursday, April 16, 2015 at 7pm. Everyone is welcome!
Rigoberto González is the author of four books of poetry including Unpeopled Eden, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Black Blossoms, two bilingual children’s books, four novels including Crossing Vines and The Mariposa Club, three books of nonfiction including Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award, a book of short stories and the editor of two anthologies. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Center Book Award. He is a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine, and on the board of directors for the National Book Critics Circle. He is currently Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
González’ poems rattle with the unexpected, imaginative, surreal, and painful. Speaking about such subjects as war, deportation, immigration, and sexuality, his poetry is both intimate and inviting to all readers. As Luis Martinez said in a review of Unpeopled Eden in Cutbank Reviews, “Rigoberto Gonzalez’s poems are surreal, visceral, and most of all, important—not just for the reader but for American poetry— they root and uproot so much they’ll leave the reader asking if they themselves are displaced. A wide-ranging and fearless collection, where we see U.S.-Mexico bordercrossers, a gay man asking his dead father for acceptance, and a brother looking for his lost brother.”
The reading, sponsored and organized by the UConn Co-op, the Aetna Chair of Writing, El Instituto, Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies, and the Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public. The UConn Co-op is the campus bookstore, located at One Royce Circle, 101 in Storrs Center. For more information, please visit the Co-op’s webpage at www.bookstore.uconn.edu, or the Creative Writing Program’s website at www.creativewriting.uconn.edu.
For more information, contact: Creative Writing at miller.oberman@uconn.edu