Award-winning Salvadoran poet William Archila will read from his new collection exploring migration, displacement and the search for identity at a special event at Vroman’s Bookstore.
Archila’s latest work, “S is For,” investigates the Central American migrant crisis against the backdrop of El Salvador’s civil war. The collection uses diverse poetic forms – including quasi-sonnet, sestina, ekphrastic and syllabic – to create a bridge between his native Central America and the United States.
“The collection expresses the importance of an inner voice from the perspective of exile – people with no country, no language, ghosts split between present and past, between home and foreign,” according to Vroman’s Bookstore’s announcement of the event.
Born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, Archila immigrated to the United States in 1980 to escape his homeland’s civil war. He later earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has published two previous collections: “The Art of Exile” (2009), which won the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award and International Latino Book Award, and “The Gravedigger’s Archaeology” (2015), recipient of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize.
“To me the function of poetry is about naming the truth,” Archila once told the Poetry Society of America.[a] “The human voice in struggle will always be important.”
Joining Archila at the event will be Pacific Palisades Poet Laureate Michelle Bitting, Stanford University Professor of English Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and poet, novelist and journalist Luis J. Rodriguez. Douglas Manuel will moderate the reading.
The 2 p.m. event will be held at Vroman’s Bookstore, located at 695 E. Colorado Blvd. For more information, call (626) 449-5320.
