Palabra Pura

Palabra Pura Presents: Javier Villasenor and Levi Romero

Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Time: Reading begins at 7:30PM
Cost: Free admission, all ages
Location: Decima Musa, 1901 S. Loomis Ave., Chicago
A short Open Mic will begin the evening.

JAVIER VILLASEÑOR ALONSO holds a degree in Communication Sciences from Intercontinental University, and a doctorate in Hispanic Philology from the University of Sevilla. His speciality is in Mexican poetry. At one point in his career he was a bullfighter. He has been a co-organizer of and helped compile anthologies for the Chilango of the Chilango Andaluz Recital, which is celebrated annually in Andalucía, Spain, and in Mexico. His books of poetry include El viaje a los espejos, Antiguos Nacimientos Ardían, and El corazón de los instantes. His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of literary magazines, and his work was included in the anthology Del Silencio hacia la Luz:Mapa Poético de México (Ediciones Zur). Javier Villaseñor currently lives in Chicago, where he works in cultural affairs at the Mexican Consulate.


LEVI ROMERO, author of A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works (UNM Press), and In the Gathering of Silence, (West End Press), and other publications, is from the Embudo Valley of northern New Mexico. Romero is a bilingual poet whose language is immersed in the regional 'manito dialect of northern New Mexico with its 17th century archaisms and melodic registers. His work has been published throughout the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Cuba. Romero's writing is a narrative tapestry of formal poetics woven through a palette of Nuevo Mexicano colloquialisms and the poetic richness of vernacular language. A winner of numerous awards, he recently taught in the creative writing program at the University of New Mexico and is currently a Research Scholar at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning program focusing on cultural landscape studies. He is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.