San Miguel Poetry Week [] Teatro Santa Ana

San Miguel Poetry Week
Established in 1997
Poetry classes, workshops and readings

Saturday, January 4th
7:00 pm
Carol Frost
Luis Alberto Urrea

Monday, January 6
7:00 pm
Jennifer Clement
“Showcase Poets

Tuesday, January 7
7:00 pm
Pedro Serrano
James Fenton

Wednesday, January 8
7:00 pm
Participants’ Reading

Teatro Santa Ana

The San Miguel Poetry Week is an intimate program that provides a beautiful environment for work and vacation.  San Miguel de Allende is known worldwide as one of Mexico’s most charming towns. It is famous for its mild climate, 17th century architecture, excellent restaurants, music festivals, jazz bars, thermal baths, colorful markets and shops. This magical town has been a mecca for artists from all over the world. Great poets such as Pablo Neruda and Neal Cassidy lived here. Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siquieros painted here. Today writers and artists flock to San Miguel seeking beauty along with a rich cultural scene.

THE PROGRAM

The San Miguel Poetry Week is designed so that participants take classes, go to readings, work on new poems and enjoy time to explore San Miguel de Allende. In January 2020 the week begins Friday night, January 3rd, with a welcome cocktail at 7pm at the Hotel Posada de Las Monjas. The first day begins with a writing exercise class dedicated to creating new work. Mornings consist of small workshops. In the evenings, poetry readings by the faculty will be held at Colonial Teatro Santa Ana. On Wednesday, January 87th, the last night of the program, there will be a group poetry reading by all the participants and faculty.  Additional optional Creative Writing Workshops conducted by the faculty are available   These sessions are available to participants at an additional  cost of  $60.00 per workshop.

FACULTY  JANUARY  2020

JENNIFER CLEMENT  is author of the memoir Widow Basquiat on the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the novels: A True Story Based on Lies and The Poison That Fascinates. Her novel Prayers for the Stolen received an NEA Fellowship for Literature, the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award, was a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner Award and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.  In 2016 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for her new novel, Gun Love. She is also the author of several books of poetry including The Next Stranger (with an introduction by W.S. Merwin). Clement’s work has been translated into 30 languages. Her most recent work includes The Soft Land, Clement’s translation of Lopez Velarde’s poem La suave patria, with an essay by Luis Miguel Aguilar and paintings by Gustavo Monroy. Her novel Gun Love was an New York Times Editor’s Choice. In response to the novel, the New Yorker magazine wrote that Gun Love, ‘Offer[s] a glimpse of what a poetics of gun violence might look like.’ Clement is the current and first woman President of PEN International. In 1997 she co-founded the San Miguel Poetry Week with her sister, Barbara Sibley.

JAMES FENTON was born in Lincoln in 1949. He was educated at the Durham Choristers’ School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He has worked as a political and literary journalist on the New Statesman; was a freelance reporter in Indo-China; spent a year in Germany working for the Guardian; was theatre critic for the Sunday Times for five years; chief book reviewer for The Times from 1984 to 1986; South East Asian correspondent for the Independent from 1986 to 1988 and a columnist for them until 1995.  He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.  James Fenton was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1994 to 1999.  He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2007. In 2015 he won the PEN Pinter prize. He is currently writing a collection of unusual biographies called PRIVATE LIVES, and a book about pirates for Notting Hill Press. His Collected Poems, Yellow Tulips, were published by Faber & Faber in June 2012.Yellow Tulips is a gathering from four decades of work by a writer described by the Observer as ‘the most talented poet of his generation’.

CAROL FROST was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from the State University of Oneonta and Syracuse University. The author of numerous collections of poetry, including Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (2014), Honeycomb: Poems (2010), The Queen’s Desertion (2006), I Will Say Beauty (2003), Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems (2000), and the chapbook The Salt Lesson (1976), she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and won several Pushcart Prizes. Frost has taught at Hartwick College, Washington University, and Wichita State University; she has had several teaching residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and was a visiting poet at University of Wollongong, Australia. She founded and for 15 years directed the Catskill Poetry Workshop at Hartwick College. She holds the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of English at Rollins College, where she directs the Winter with the Writers program. In October, 2019, MadHat Press will publish Carol Frost’s new poetry collection Alias City – with poems that originally appeared in such places as The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry International, Kenyon Review, Subtropics, Harvard Review, Shenandoah, and Plume. The poems feature cities and in alternating sections an immigrant interlocutor who tells a bit about where she came from and some of the ways selfhood is found and lost.

 LUIS ALBERTO URREA, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of 18 books. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, “I am more interested in bridges, not borders.” The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His latest novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named to many best of the year lists. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award in 2016 for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. The Hummingbird’s Daughter, an historical novel based on the life of Teresita Urrea, known as the Mexican Joan of Arc, won the Kiriyama Prize for fiction. Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, “Amapola”). His first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. He also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life and his book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in the 1996 Best American Poetry collection. Urrea is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois.

PEDRO SERRANO  (Montreal 1957) is a poet and teaches at UNAM in Mexico DF. He is Director of the Banff International Literary