Words on a wire: Ruben Martinez reads about The Desert

Ruben Martinez reads about The Desert

Ruben Martinez is this week's guest. This video is, Variedades at The Echo. Starring Ruben Martinez, Richard Montaya, Victoria Williams, Elia Arce, Douglas Burton-Christie, Josh Kun and Angela Garcia. Directed by Colin Campbell.

Listen to our radio interview from this blog's left side panel archives. His latest book, Desert America was written by fraternizing with his demons in the Joshua Tree desert, not from a book advance. There is a power involved in representing different ethnic, class or art histories of the Chihuahuan, New Mexican or Joshua Tree desert. This show talks about such politics of narration. 'Mike Wilson is out in the desert right now, putting out water for people who are crossing it.'

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Words on a wire.

Words on a Wire is a radio show about fiction, poetry, the writing community, and whatever other issues concern literary writers and readers of books. Hosted by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Daniel Chacón.

Originally broadcasted on www.ktep.org

Write to us: soychacon@gmail.com

El Paso, Texas.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz received the American Book Award in 1992 for his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust. A former Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford, he also received a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, a Southwest Book Award, the Paterson Prize, and the Americas Book Award and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. He is the author of over 10 books, both fiction and poetry. His most recent poetry collection is The Book of What Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). His new YA novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is coming out in 2011 from Simon and Schuster. He is the chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories, Unending Rooms, was the 2007 winner of the Hudson Prize. He has also been awarded the American Book Award, the Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Southwest Book Award. His first collection of stories, Chicano Chicanery was a finalist in the Patterson Fiction Prize and his novel and the shadows took him is available from Simon and Schuster. He has just completed a new collection of stories called Hotel Júarez. He’s a professor of Fiction Writing, Kafka, and Latino/a literature in the Creative Writing Department at UTEP.