American Book Award Winner to Share Poetry with Campus

The English Department is hosting Carmen Giménez Smith, an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher, in a poetry reading, Tuesday, April 8, at 12:15 p.m. in Ketchum Hall 320. The reading is free and open to the public.

Giménez Smith is author of the collections Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009); The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011); Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012); Milk and Filth (University of Arizona, 2013); and the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (2010), which won the 2011 American Book Award. Goodbye, Flicker received the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Milk and Filth was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award, considered among the most prestigious writing awards in the country.

"Carmen’s writing encompasses both the rigor and complexity of avant-garde tendencies as well as the socio-political elements of gender and ethnic identity concerns," said poet and literary critic Peter Ramos, associate professor of English, whose work includes a review of Gimenez-Smith’s poetry. "I am impressed with her work."

A New York native, Giménez Smith is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico; the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, the school’s journal of new literature; and is publisher of Noemi Press, a literary arts organization.