San Miguel Poetry Week 2007
By Kathy Snodgrass, Dec 22, 2006

San Miguel Poetry Week readings

January 2–6, 7pm
Bellas Artes, Hernández Macías 75
Poetry Reading Schedule
Bellas Artes, 7pm

Tues., Jan. 2
Paul Lisicky and Glyn Maxwell 

Wed., Jan 3
Mark Doty and Paul Muldoon

Thurs., Jan. 4
Margorie Agosín and Victor Manuel Mendiola

Fri., Jan. 5
Luis Miguel Aguilar, Kathy Snodgrass and W. D. Snodgrass

Sat., Jan. 6
Poets and Participants


San Miguel Poetry Week 2007 runs from January 2 to 6. Founded by sisters—and poets—Jennifer Clement and Barbara Sibley, who grew up in Mexico City, the conference draws participants from the United States, Canada and Mexico who will spend their mornings working on their poems in small groups. Each evening at 7pm in the Bellas Artes auditorium, free public readings will be given.

Eleven years ago, Clement and Sibley decided that San Miguel and poetry were a perfect mix. Flying solo, with no institutional backing, they invited four internationally known poets to give workshops and readings. They then advertised in major poetry publications for prospective participants to submit work and apply for admission. The two sisters decided from the outset that theirs would be a small conference so that serious poets could benefit from daily, intensive workshops. For many, it’s been such a gratifying experience that they’ve come back year after year. Conference-goers with tenure: not exactly commonplace in the poetry world. As a way to thank San Miguel for the pleasure of its company—and confident they’d find an arts-friendly audience—Clement and Sibley also decided to offer public readings each evening.

Jennifer Clement’s poetry and prose have been translated into eight languages. Her first book of poems, The Next Stranger, has an introduction by W. S. Merwin. Her first novel, A True Story Based on Lies, was a finalist for Great Britain’s Orange Prize. In 2008, the English publisher Canongate Books will publish her second novel. She is the recipient of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores grant. 

Barbara Sibley is a poet and painter now living in New York City. She is co-owner of two of New York’s finest Mexican restaurants, La Palapa and La Palapa Rockola, one in the West Village and one in the East Village. 

Poet, essayist and fiction writer Luis Miguel Aguilar was born in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico. His first book of poems, Medio de construcción, appeared in 1979, followed by Chetumal Bay Anthology, modeled after Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, in 1983. He has edited several anthologies and published a book of critical essays, La democracia de los muertos: Ensayo sobre poesía mexicana, 1800–1921 (1988). His book of selected poems, Todo lo que sé, appeared in 1990. His most recent book is Fábulas de Ovidio (2001), versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Aguilar is the former editor and now advisory editor of the prestigious Mexican arts and culture monthly Nexos.

A professor of Spanish at Wellesley College, Marjorie Agosín has written over 20 books of poetry and prose, including A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile; she has also edited anthologies dedicated to Latin-American women writers. In 1998, she was honored by the United Nations for her human rights work, and in 2002 the government of Chile awarded her the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor for Life Achievement. 

She has also received the Letras de Oro Prize and the Latino Literature Prize. Her book of new and selected poems, At the Threshold of Memory, appeared in 2003. Forthcoming books include Secrets in the Sand: The Women of Ciudad Juárez. 

Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poems, most recently School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005). His prose book, Dog Years, will appear in 2007 and includes a chapter set in San Miguel.

A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Doty is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the University of Houston’s graduate writing program. His many awards include a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the first American poet to have received Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize.

Paul Lisicky has a BA and MA from Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. He has taught at the University of Houston and in Antioch University’s low-residency MFA writing program. Currently, he teaches fiction and literary nonfiction in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of the novel Lawnboy and the memoir Famous Builder. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and twice from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming in 2007.

Glyn Maxwell read English at Oxford University and has taught at Amherst, Columbia and The New School. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is poetry editor for The New Republic. Since his first book, Tale of the Mayor’s Son, appeared in 1990, he has published numerous books of poems, fiction, nonfiction, works for radio and theater and opera libretti. His many awards include the Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Three of his books were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He is currently adapting Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose for Moving Pictures Theatre Company.

Born in Mexico City, Victor Manuel Mendiola is a poet, publisher, editor and critic. A member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores, he has received numerous awards, including the Latino Literary Prize given by the Latin American Institute of Writers in New York. In 1981 Juan Rulfo awarded Mendiola one of Mexico’s most prestigious grants. In 1980 Mendiola founded the poetry press Ediciones el Tucan de Virginia, which has published 200 books of poets from around the world. President of Mexico City’s PEN chapter from 1997–2000, he directs the international literary festival Letras del Mundo. In 2003, UNAM University Press published his collected poems, Tan Oro y Ogro.

Born in Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, Paul Muldoon attended Queen’s University of Belfast. Before emigrating to the US in 1987, Muldoon was a BBC radio and television producer. He is now the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton and Chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. From 1999–2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. His most recent book of poems, Horse Latitudes, appeared in 2006. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon has won numerous awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize.

Kathy Snodgrass’s translations of Luis Miguel Aguilar’s poems have appeared in journals in the US and Great Britain, including The Review, The Formalist, Chelsea, The Great River Review, and Hunger Mountain. A regular reviewer of short fiction for The Georgia Review, she is the author of The Fiction of Hortense Calisher (1993). With her husband, W. D. Snodgrass, Kathy Snodgrass has edited and translated Numele Tau/Your Name (2003), poems by the Romanian writer Dona Rosu. Her translations have appeared in several anthologies, most recently Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website (2003).

W. D. Snodgrass has published over 20 books of poetry, prose and translation and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. His first book of poems, Heart’s Needle (1959), won the Pulitzer Prize. Since then, he has received grants from the Guggenheim, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999, his Selected Translations received the Academy of American Poets’ translation award. A Fellow of the Academy of American Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Snodgrass has received several honorary doctorates. His most recent book is Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (2006). 

For more information on San Miguel Poetry Week, visit www.sanmiguelpoetry.com  or email poetryweek@aol.com 

San Miguel Writers’ Conference

Conference, Saturday & Sunday, 
February 24 & 25
Hotel Real de Minas
www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com 
US$225

2007 is the year of the snappy dialogue, writers! Screenplay Writing is the new feature of the Second Annual San Miguel Writers’ Conference, to be held at Hotel Real de Minas February 24 and 25. San Miguel memoirist Beverly Donofrio will moderate a panel of screenwriters and film festival directors discussing topics from the film world. The discussion will be presented in the main hall to all participants 

The 2007 conference is now a two-day event filled with manuscript contests, panel discussions, open mic readings, book signings and almost two dozen breakout sessions on topics ranging from Fiction to Self-Publishing to Translating to How to Create Characters or a Writing Group. 

Popular novelist, memoirist, travel writer and one-time San Miguel resident Tony Cohan will give a luncheon address on Sunday, February 25. His recent book is Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico. 

New York literary agent Joy Harris, president of Joy Harris Literary Agency, will give private consultations to 10 authors who will be selected by a panel of judges based on their fiction or memoir manuscripts. To compete for one of the 10 spots, sign up for the conference first, then send US$30 and the first 30 pages of an adult fiction or memoir manuscript to an email address indicated on www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com. The contest deadline is January 10, 2007. 

Also new in 2007 is the Children’s Book Writers’ Review & Critique, intended for aspiring writers of children’s books with submission-ready material. A sample of 500 words (a manuscript, an excerpt, or a synopsis) will be reviewed by a published children’s author in a unique opportunity to get feedback from real professionals in the field. More information on the critique is found on the San Miguel Writers’ Conference website. The deadline to submit material is February 1, 2007. 

A two-day ticket for the conference, including lunch, costs US$225. Writers can sign up at La Conexión, Aldama 3, or go to the registration page at www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com 

Death row writings: words that give wings
Readings from the writings of Jarvis Jay Masters
Hosted by Patrice Wynne
Friday, December 22, 5–7pm, Posada San Francisco, 
Plaza Principal 2, 50 pesos

The Authors’ Sala has earned a well-deserved reputation for presenting outstanding literary programs at its monthly readings. This month’s reading will be a bit of a departure from the usual format but promises to continue the tradition of excellence while presenting a moving, thought-provoking evening. The featured writer will not be reading from his writings—he is serving a life sentence on Death Row in San Quentin Prison. Instead, his words will be read by an illustrious group of San Miguel writers and actors: Michael Sudheer, Victor Sahuatoba (reading in Spanish), Kirsten Dehner, Lynette Seator and Anado McLauchlin. 

This event has been organized by well-known local resident Patrice Wynne, a friend of Jarvis Jay Masters. Wynne will share with us how she came to know Masters and will also introduce her friend, Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator who represents Death Row prisoners, including Masters. The readings will likely stimulate thoughts about the death penalty and the power of redemption. 

Don’t miss this event!