(P)EAR is back with Diane Thiel and Tony Mares
Next week, at 3 pm on Sunday April 15th at the Projects, 3614 High Street NE, our spring program coordinator Tanaya Winder hosts another installment of (P)EAR: Poetics & Poems. This time current UNM Poetry Professor Diane Thiel is joined by E.A.”Tony” Mares, Professor Emeritus of English at UNM. Both will offer perspectives on poetry craft and aesthetics, the various pleasures working with words can take.
Diane Thiel’s first collection, Echolocations, won the 2000 Nicholas Roerich Prize and took second place in ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year competition. Many of the poems in Echolocations speak frankly about Thiel’s German heritage and the lineage of trauma brought on by war and violence. Christine Stewart-Nuñez observed in Prairie Schooner that Thiel’s later collection, Resistance Fantasies, a 2004 National Book Award nominee, “explore[s] myth and personal story, legends and contemporary public issues.… Thiel portrays women who resist appearances or conventions, especially the ways myths typically construct them.” Thiel has now authored eight books and she also won an NEA International Literature Award for her translation of American Fugue, Alexis Stamatis’s poetic novel. Thiel has lived in Europe and South America and is fluent in several languages. A 2001 Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers awards, Thiel holds BA and MFA degrees from Brown University. She has taught creative writing, literature, and other subjects at the University of Miami, Florida International University, the University of New Mexico, and elsewhere.
E. A. “Tony” Mares is a poet, historian, essayist, and fiction writer who has published extensively. His work has appeared in local, regional, national, and international venues. Among his works are three chapbooks, two books of poetry, and one book of translations of the poems of Ángel González. : His books include The Unicorn Poem & Flowers and Songs of Sorrow (Albuquerque, West End Press, 1992), With the Eyes of a Raptor (San Antonio, Wings Press, 2004), and his translations of poems by the noted Spanish poet Ángel González, Casi Toda la Música y otros poemas/Almost All the Music and Other Poems (San Antonio, Wings Press, 2007). Most recently, along with Tomás Atencio and Miguel Montiel, he co-authored Resolana: Emerging Chicano Dialogues on Community and Globalization (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2009).
In addition to his literary work, Mares has a doctorate in European History and he has taught at many colleges, universities, and other educational venues. He is Professor Emeritus of English, The University of New Mexico, where he taught poetry and fiction writing in the Creative Writing Program. He founded and directed what may have been the first university based Internet outreach program in the United States designed to involve mid-school, high school, and adult writers in an online learning environment called the Writers Inn. This program encouraged a network of young students to develop their writing skills and placed them in contact with university-based professional writers. Early in his career, Mares’s research and publications reinvigorated the study of Padre Antonio José Martínez of Taos, a key figure in New Mexican and Southwestern History. From the spring of 2000 through the spring of 2001, Mares published a weekly newspaper political and literary column in Spanish, Pláticas Entre Los Trasnochadores/Conversations Among People Who Stay Up All Night, in the Albuquerque Journal North, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mares was the poet-in-residence for the University of Oklahoma’s Summer Program in Santa Fe, New Mexico 2004 –2009. Conversations I Never Had With Patrociño Barela came out from UNM Press in 2010. Also, Fall 2010, Voices of the American Land published a chapbook by Mares based on imagery from the Rio Grande.
Hope you can join us for this conversation.
