Up Against Erasure | Faculty Reading: Ángel García

Professor Ángel García (English/Creative Writing) will read from his latest collection, Indifferent Cities.

About Indifferent Cities: Through one state to another, from one country to the next, Indifferent Cities traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least. Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as well as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across four generations.

Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, Indifferent Cities wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the author’s inevitable return to determine where and to who he belongs.

About the speaker: Ángel García, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Indifferent Cities (Tupelo Press), winner of a Helena Whitehill Book award, and Teeth Never Sleep (University of Arkansas Press), recipient of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and finalist for a PEN America Open Book Award and a Kate Tufts Award. His work has been published in the American Poetry Review, McSweeney's, Crab Orchard Review, Huizache, The Acentos Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Adroit Journal, and most recently in Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing and Gulf Coast. The recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell, Ángel is currently an associate professor of English and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.