January 5 Guests

Francisco  X. Alarcón
Bi-national, bi-cultural, and bilingual poet and educator Francisco  X. Alarcón is an award-winning author of ten volumes of poetry for both children and adults. Alarcón is the recipient of 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and  the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize. In April 2002 he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA). He was one of the three finalists nominated for the state poet laureate of California. Alarcón’s books include Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes / Sonetos a la locura y otras penas, From the Other Side of Night / Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems, and, most recently, from Swan Scythe Press, Ce•Uno•One: Poems para el Nuevo Sol / Poems for the New Sun, which includes translations of the poems in English, Spanish, Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, Mapuche, the language of indigenous people of Argentina and Chile, and Gaelic, the original language of Ireland. Alarcón teaches for the Department of Spanish at the University of California, Davis.