Lesson Nine: Maya Angelou & Alberto Rios Poetry Due

Bloom's Literature Rios Alberto

Mexican-American writer Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born in 1952 in Nogales, Arizona, on the border with Mexico. His father was from Tapachula, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, and his mother was born in Warrington, Lancashire, England. After growing up in Nogales Ríos attended the University of Arizona, where he earned his degree in literature in 1974 and a second degree in psychology in 1975. In 1979 he earned a master's in creative writing, also from the University of Arizona. That same year he married Lupita Barron of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.

A contributor to Chicano literature, Ríos writes in several genres, including poetry—Whispering to Fool the Wind: Poems (1982), Five Indiscretions (1985), The Lime Orchard Woman (1988), Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses (1990), and The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002)—fiction—The Iguana Killer (1984), Pig Cookies (1995), and The Curtain of Trees (1999)—and memoir—Capirotada (1999). His more recent poetry collections include The Theater of Night (2006) and The Dangerous Shirt (2008), which Publishers Weekly called "discursive yet aglitter with images."

His awards are numerous. The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body was a 2002 National Book Award finalist. He has received a Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, a Latino Literary Hall of Fame 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, and six Pushcart Prizes in poetry and fiction.

Ríos's work can be placed within the context of border literature for its focus on regional and Mexican-American culture. His work challenges preconceived notions of boundaries. Past and present, self and other, near and far, internal and external, here and there, the body and the world, Ríos reveals how these seemingly separate spaces hold opportunities for connection, conversation, understanding, and multiple imaginative possibilities. The world Ríos creates in his books is a world characterized by magical realism. Ríos explores the pliability of dreams and material reality, where dreams inform and emerge from reality as much as reality emerges from and informs dreams. A writer of the heart and the mind, Ríos moves fluidly within and through the realms of both. Family stories are as strong as local legends. Great-aunts are like forces of nature, and forces of nature display human traits. Ríos's writing—whether poetry, fiction, or memoir—is a writing of place, community, and family. And as places, communities, and families are made up of friends, loners, outcasts, lovers, enemies, and any one of these disguised as any other, so too are Ríos's books multiply populated. And as places, communities, and families are held together by strands of tradition, understanding, secrets, and love, so too are Ríos's books held together.

Ríos's writing is expressive of a consciousness that embraces familial, historical, intellectual, stylistic, and spiritual nuances without quieting the contradictions that exist between these different facets of experience. Ríos writes of revolutions and of the "disappeared." He writes about victims of violence hung from telephone poles. He writes of aunts, of his Nani, and of other familial matriarchs and patriarchs. He writes of fortune-tellers and of science. He writes of the dead who speak through drain pipes and the creak of rocking chairs, of how many people happen to be airborne above the United States at any given time, of the dispossessed of a town, and of the homeless, the unwanted, and the mentally unique and thus feared. He writes in forms from many cultures. He skillfully and imaginatively weaves composites of ideas, of places, and of people that gain the power of all their component parts. Ríos writes about composites the way Aztec deities were composites—the plumed serpent, the were-jaguar—and, in writing such composites, he evokes a consciousness that spans multiple spaces and centuries.

Ríos currently teaches at Arizona State University where he is a distinguished Regents' Professor and the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English. He resides in Chandler, Arizona, with his wife and son, Joaquin.

Further Information

Dunaway, David King, and Sara L. Spurgeon, eds. Writing the Southwest. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1995.

Praitis, Irena. "'He gathered to himself through the years / Something of everything he knew': Metaphor, Composites, and Multiplicity in the Poetry of Alberto Ríos." Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación 1, no. 1 (2004): 81–88.

Ríos, Alberto. Capirotada. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

———. The Curtain of Trees. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

———. Five Indiscretions. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1985.

———. The Iguana Killer. Lewiston, N.Y.: Blue Moon and Confluence Press, 1984.

———. The Lime Orchard Woman. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1988.

———. Pig Cookies. San Francisco, Calif.: Chronicle Books, 1995.

———. The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2002.

———. Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

———. Whispering to Fool the Wind. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1982.

Rosaldo, Renato. "Fables of the Fallen Guy." In Criticism in the Borderlands, edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, 84–93. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Vela, Richard. "The Idea of Boundaries in the Work of Alberto Ríos." Pembroke Magazine 34 (2002): 115–121.

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