Interview with Lee & Bobby Byrd. Sunday, April 15th, 2012.

29: Ben & Daniel talk with Lee & Bobby Byrd, owners & publishers for Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso. They talk about how they were introduced to the world of publishing, and how Cinco Puntos became a home for books no one else would publish because they connected so closely with the border culture. They also talk about the poetry collection “Beauty is a Verb” which features works written by writers with disabilities.

The Poem of the Week is read by Bobby Byrd, and comes from the “Beauty is a Verb” collection. “Avoiding Rigidity” by Hal Sirowitz, who lives with Parkinson’s Disease.

Writer Denise Chávez will also be talking about the upcoming Border Book Festival, which takes place April 19-22 in Mesilla NM.



Bobby Byrd, poet, essayist and publisher—grew up in Memphis, Tennessee during the golden age of that city’s music. In 1963 he went to Tucson where he attended the University of Arizona. Since then he has lived in the American Southwest. In 1978 he and his wife—novelist Lee Merrill Byrd—moved to El Paso, Texas with their three children. The city and the border region has become their home.

Bobby Byrd, the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the NEA, a D.H. Lawrence fellowship, and an international fellowship to study in Mexico, is one of the most accessible poets writing today. His work is compassionate, tender & joyful. He is the author of numerous books of poetry including Pomegranates, Get Some Fuses for the House, On the Transmigration of Souls in El Paso, The Price of Doing Business in Mexico, and his most recent, White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits & Pieces of Love.

He and Lee are publishers and owners of Cinco Puntos Press. In 2005 they received the Lannan Fellowship for Cultural Freedom. Click here to read about the Lannan Foundation award!

(Taken from http://www.cincopuntos.com/authors_detail.sstg?id=4 )

Lee Merrill Byrd, novelist and publisher, was born and raised in New Jersey but has spent most of her life in the Southwest. In 1985, with her husband, poet Bobby Byrd, she founded Cinco Puntos Press, a publishing company named after their neighborhood in El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos—a publisher of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and children’s literature—is recognized for bringing the multicultural literatures of the American Southwest, the U.S./Mexico border region and Mexico to a national audience. Lee and Bobby have three children and five grandchildren.

Lee’s collection of short stories, My Sister Disappears, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1993. It received a Southwest Book Award and the Stephen F. Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for the best first work of fiction in 1993. In 1997, she was the recipient of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship. In 2005, she and her husband received Cultural Freedom Fellowships from the Lannan Foundation.

In October 2003, Cinco Puntos published Lee’s first picture book for children, The Treasure on Gold Street, A Neighborhood Story in Spanish and English. It received a Skipping Stones Honor Book Award, a Southwest Book Award, a Paterson Poetry Center Prize, and a Teddy Award from the Texas Writers League.

Cinco Puntos published Lover Boy, A Bilingual Counting Book, in the Fall of 2005. In the Spring of 2006, Algonquin Books published Lee’s first novel, Riley's Fire. People Magazine chose Riley's Fire as one of the top 10 books of 2006.