Interview with Roberto Tejada, Poet & author of “Carbonate of Copper”

by Rey M. Rodríguez

To speak with Roberto Tejada is to enter a vast and shifting constellation of art, poetry, and cultural memory—an image world where language is always in motion, and the future is never separate from the past. An award-winning poet, critic, and art historian, Tejada has spent decades mapping the political imagination of the Americas through the impurities of time, translation, and visual culture. His influential scholarship includes National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (both Minnesota, 2009), alongside essays for landmark exhibitions such as “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980” and “Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon.” His poetics—rendered across collections like Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and the Spanish-language selection Todo en el ahora—move with the urgency of an artistic practice attuned to the complexities of hemispheric identity and shared image environments. In 2021, he received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

Before becoming one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Latine letters, Tejada spent a formative decade in Mexico City (1987–1997), where he worked as an editor at Vuelta, the cultural monthly founded by Octavio Paz, and later as executive editor of Artes de México, a leading journal of Mexican art from the pre-conquest era to the present. He also founded Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, a groundbreaking multilingual literary journal dedicated to innovative writing and high-quality translation across English and Spanish. The journal’s sixteen issues—along with archival photographs, correspondence, and related materials—now reside in digital form at Northwestern University’s Open Door Archive.

A committed educator and cultural interlocutor, Tejada has taught at UNAM, Dartmouth, UC San Diego, UT Austin, SMU, Naropa, and Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His work continues to illuminate regional, transnational, and diasporic terrains, with particular focus on the language arts and visual cultures of Latin America, the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, and U.S. Latine communities. Today, as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, he teaches Creative Writing and Art History—continuing to bridge disciplines, geographies, and generations.

In this conversation, Tejada reflects on his latest book Carbonate of Copper and the role of the political imagination in shaping the futures we hope to inhabit.

Professor Roberto Tejada, thank you so much for being here for Storyteller’s Corner of Chapter House, the literary journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts. We're just so grateful that you're willing to give of your time to speak to us.

I'm delighted, Rey. Thank you for having me.

How did you get into writing, and why do you write?

That is a complex and long history, but like many writers, I was greatly influenced by early teachers, and I was lucky to have grown up in Los Angeles with immigrant parents who valued and endorsed reading. There were books at home. I remember early on in the Catholic grammar school that I attended that there was an interest in poetry and writing.

By the time I attended Loyola High School in Los Angeles, I had met a great teacher who has since passed. He taught mostly novels which were of interest to me. But poetry became key to my curiosities, thanks to a very cantankerous Basque, Professor Antonio Morillo, who was particularly hard on those of us who were legacy Spanish speakers. He was the first to introduce me to the poetry of César Vallejo, for example. Another professor, Susan Roth, was the first to introduce me to Wallace Stevens. So those were the first poets, both modernists, one in English, one in Spanish, who influenced me. Another professor was Father Greg Boyle, who now runs Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit that offers educational and reentry services to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated individuals. Greg is also the accomplished author of books I admire, meditations on the profound nature of compassion and what he calls radical kinship.

That gave me a sense of the possibilities of language, and that was the first entry into writing. Then I went to NYU and studied in the Comparative Literature Department. One of the first workshops I took, because I didn't pursue a traditional creative writing background, was with a poet who has also recently passed, Michael Burkhard. He was key in encouraging my interest in modernist poetry and postmodern authors.

As an adolescent in Los Angeles, I discovered the great bygone journal, Sulfur, which was edited by the poet Clayton Eshelman, who was the translator of César Vallejo. That journal was important to me, insofar as it connected poetry, anthropology, and the visual arts. It really considered the poetic imagination in the broadest sense, and that had an impact on me later on, as did another magazine I’ve recently written about, El Corno Emplumado, which Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon published in Mexico City in the late sixties and early seventies.

It was a remarkable magazine, which has been very important to my thinking. I first looked through the archive in the Special Collections Library at Bobst's Library when I was an undergraduate at NYU. 

They have the papers and archive of El Corno Emplumado.

Fantastic.

Then I moved to Mexico City after I graduated, and I worked for Octavio Paz, who ran the magazine, Vuelta, and that opportunity arose through the intercession of my friend Eliot Weinberger—whom I met in New York at the time—an influential essayist and a translator of Octavio Paz.

I worked for Vuelta for 2 years, and then was recruited to an art magazine called Artes de Mexico. I was in my twenties, and I was surrounded by young poets. It was a vibrant intellectual life that Roberto Bolaño captures perfectly in The Savage Detectives.

Come on. This is so amazing. When I read Bolaño’s book, it completely turned me around because it was such a celebration of the moment.

It also arrived in my life at a time when I was a little disenchanted with the business of poetry and the literary machinery. The book brought back to me the joy of being in one's twenties. All I could think about was reading poetry and conspiring with my artist friends in some way, as I did at the time when, in my twenties. I started a journal called Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. Each issue of the journal became an increasingly weighty volume.

That's a broad sweep of my entry point into poetry and writing.

Well, that's extraordinary. I have to ask you about your experience with Octavio Paz. I mean, that's a gift. I remember I was at Cornell, and Jorge Luis Borges came, and I just got a moment with him when he gave a lecture. What was it like to work with Paz?

So, briefly about Borges, because I was an undergrad at NYU at the same time. It must have been my first year. So in 1982, Borges was invited to speak, and, as you would imagine . . .

That's when he came to Cornell. He must have been on a tour, because I saw him that year, as well.

It was impossible to get in. It was so overcrowded that I was only able to listen from the lobby of the auditorium, and they were just booming in the audio. We didn't even have a video of the conversation, but that was my only contact with Borges was when he was giving that conference in 1982.

There's so much I could say about Octavio Paz. It was a gift. I was fortunate to have landed within the inner circle of that intellectual world he had orchestrated around himself.

For those who don't know Octavio Paz, could you give some information about him?

Octavio Paz, born in 1914, passed shortly after I left Mexico. So it must have been in 1998. He was one of the great international modernist writers whose career spanned the 20th century, a Mexican poet who witnessed the Spanish Civil War, befriended André Breton, and was informed by surrealist practice in his late twenties and early thirties. He returned to Mexico and became involved with various important journals. Friend and heir to a previous generation, known as Los Contemporáneos, whose aesthetics were informed by French avant-garde poetry.

For those unfamiliar with Octavio's poetic imagination, it is one that combined the various worlds and worldviews of Mexico—pre-conquest, colonial and modern—through the collage techniques of the surrealists.

Excellent. 

My favorite books by Octavio are those he wrote when he served as Mexico’s ambassador in India. Those are books from the sixties, Salamander and Eastern Slope, collections informed by the effervescence of the counterculture and the belief informed by surrealism that the word, as a form of “superior revolt,” can actually make an impact and change the world.

This is only to speak of the poetry, because he was an essayist, a writer on art, and a political thinker.

Now, I should also quickly add that Octavio is a divisive figure. During the years I lived in Mexico, the literary world was very much divided between two journals. One was Vuelta, where I worked for 2 years; the other was Nexos. Vuelta was seen, and rightfully so, as right of center. It was much more conservative, maybe much more curious, sometimes even experimental in its literary taste. Nexos was much more leftist and progressive, but maybe more conventional in its aesthetic understanding.

Someone of Octavio's prominence… well, he was a very challenging person to work for. He and I had two major falling outs, largely because I was in my twenties and not inclined to be deferential. My sense is that he was both annoyed and amused by my impertinence, the fact that I challenged him. He saw that I enjoyed sparring, and often the sparring would be mostly about literary attitudes, because at that point, in the eighties, Octavio was already becoming much more conservative and protective. He was moving away from his more experimental and avant-garde leanings, even in his taste, although this is someone who always endorsed and was supportive of younger writers. One thing that is important to underline, he was one of the first Mexican intellectuals of his stature who was interested in Latinos in the United States. I mean, he wrote one of the first catalogue pieces for an exhibition of Latino art that featured at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, 1987). As for me, he offered this Colombian American interested in Mexico’s art, history, and culture the opportunity to live and work there. 

Interesting.

Even as his curiosities were truly much more on the side of disruption and novelty, one contradiction was that he had also cultivated a powerful establishment position through the mass media in Mexico, especially his relationship to the private media conglomerate Televisa, which provided him a platform. As an intellectual who served as the moral consciousness of a nation, he might have been the last of that type. One in which the intellectual served as an interlocutor with power in a way impossible to imagine in the United States.

Yes.

And so, he was navigating that complex dance between being in a position to sway opinion as part of the Mexican intelligentsia to have an impact on lawmakers and on power. But also, what that means for one's actual commitments to a particular aesthetic tendency.

That was a very difficult dance to play with a government that had been ensconced for so many years. And then trying to keep that revolutionary aspect of it. And yet, this is also a very conservative portion of the politic.

Yes, so, on the one hand, he was very critical of the PRI, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Especially, in 1968, when the massacre at Tlatelolco took place. He was one of the Latin American intellectuals who saw the importance of Anglo-American U.S. Modernism, and was its promoter in Mexico, but he was also a fierce critic of U.S. geopolitics. His book, El ogro filantrópico (The Philanthropic Ogre), is a critique of the colonial relationship between the United States and Mexico.

What do you consider poetry, and what does it mean to you?

For me, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of thinking through the entangled encounters of life and language, and circumstance. As for my purposes, let's say, one that finds a way in which the word, in a frenzy of images and heightened sonic states, can at least change the picture of the present in a particular way, which is to say that I do think the poetic imagination has the capacity of creating a wedge or some kind of interruption into everyday life, if only because it asks us to pause and consider language of no particular pragmatic or utilitarian value. Not for its own sake, but language that asks us to attend and respond in new ways to the everyday world.

That's beautiful. Well, that's a great entry point into your book, Carbonate of Copper. I have to admit it's a book of poetry that I had to read several times. I felt like your essay in the back helped so much to tie what you were saying in the essay with the poetry, which is extraordinary. I encourage everyone to do that and to read it. But let's start with your opening poem about a hangman. Give us some insight into why that's your first poem, and what it means.

Well, I'm very pleased to hear that, because I'm never quite certain whether it's a good idea to turn to narrative for perspective, providing a guideline to what might be at stake in the poems prior, but I also felt the need in that essay, which I consider a map to give a sense of where the book was written, because place is so important to the book, or I should say places, including that of the title, which for me serves as a kind of talisman. I remember reading that description in a classic book by the great art historian Michael Baxandall: carbonate of copper, this other mineral considered, in a sense, second order, or lesser than lapis lazuli, to create the wonderfully blue, deep blue for Renaissance painting. Azurite was a highly valuable substance enmeshed in the colonial economies of the early modern world; so carbonate of copper began to suggest as well a sort of mesmerizing blue powder able to cast a spell and to conjure a mood throughout the poems, and maybe that's a good lead into hangman, which, for me, was a very final decision to make that the opening poem as I was structuring the book.

I wanted, on the one hand, to create a kind of itinerary, as the book is divided into places that begin in West Texas, near Marfa, and then move southeast towards Brownsville.

Some have remarked on the degree to which the poems utilize the first person singular as compared to other books of mine, and I'm happy about that because I came to that voice from a different perspective than, say, the autobiographical self, insomuch as my desire was to speak in the singular, but also the plural. The plural, meaning both the human and the more-than-human, the present and the past, a personhood capacious enough for me to include, let's say, autobiographical material that appears early on in the book, as in the poem “Hangman,” which could so beckon as to be the voice available for anyone to dwell in.

“Hangman,” to me, features these particular strains of crossing over. I wanted there to be an ominous or foreboding sense, the hangman serving as the executioner. On the one hand, we look at the cover, and it's a 1939 photograph by Russell Lee of vernacular housing in the Rio Grande Valley. But then you turn to “Hangman”, and the first images are of this unspecified forest. I wanted those two worlds to coexist. One that is entirely composed within the archetypal imagination and the other reflective of the concrete world on the Texas-Mexico border as experienced in the Rio Grande Valley. I fashioned the persona of the poems, the emerging voice, as both myself but also someone adjacent to myself. The mother that appears in that poem is both an autobiographical mother, but also the psychological placeholder for families subjected to the pressures and dangers in this figurative but very concrete location.

How do you go about crafting your poetry? Is each poem different? Is it a different journey, or do you have a certain approach?

I would say that this work followed a process or method that's not unlike previous ways in which I’ve tended to construct a book. Writing for me is very much an uncertain, unstable space largely prompted by arbitrary sounds that suggest word patterns, circumstances, and spaces I begin to build around. Unlike prior books, Carbonate of Copper came relatively quickly to me; that is, I wrote the greater part of it as I was spending weeks at a time in McAllen or Brownsville, and writing in relation to my surroundings. Poems began to emerge in consecutive patterns. Sometimes language abandoned in one section would come to light elsewhere. A poetic cycle or sequence began to surface, not necessarily in the order that appears in the final book form.

The material technique called for an evolving storyboard, printed pages and adhesive tape in accordion form so that I could visualize what needed to be spared for a poem to have its own specific breath. In Carbonate of Copper, more than in other books, each poem inhabits a particular visual support. 

I wanted them to exist as if they were sound sculptures.

Much of this thinking comes from my relationship to an arts organization in Houston, Nameless Sound, conceived in 2010 by the great experimental composer, Pauline Oliveros, together with founding director David Dove, The book begins with an epigraph by Oliveros—who was really a philosopher of sound—that speaks first about getting lost in and then finding the form adequate to a particular sequence of sounds.

Well, I definitely wanted to talk about form. How do you think about the form, and how important is it to you? 

The question of form is important to my work, but never as something preordained: an attitude indebted to the open field poetics of mid-20th-century work by Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, in which the page itself becomes a visual score. I definitely wanted the blank spaces of the page to be the support for lines that suggest how breath is given to be intoned, or as it moves back and forth between its appearance and sonic articulation, that is, to constrain or contradict the obvious way one would phrase a poem. To my mind, that is, to create the most syncopated soundscape possible, the broadest varieties of syllabic breath, the accrual of consonants and vowels able to shape narrative meaning by way of sound.

I hadn't heard this term before, but I read it in an article that includes an email exchange between you and Christopher Rey Perez. You both describe his idea of a “lyric breath.”

Yes.

Can you explain what that is?

It's one way of thinking through lyric encounter and what might be called a mood of nearness. It's about intimacy in its basic form. It's a relationship between a self and another. I want lyric breath to describe what happens when the persona is in direct communication with a specific someone or several listeners, but also, and more importantly, that the breath itself, that the emergent sound is performing the work of personhood. So that we're not always attaching a private or psychological narrative to the life processes—and on the side, rather, of a collective flourishing by way of breath.

That's so helpful to me, because yes, I was challenged by some of your poems. Now, I appreciate that just an acknowledgement of the breath makes you not take it for granted. And so now, the reader is tied into the moment, and then you can acknowledge the sacredness of this moment.

I love that. Yes, for me it's a suspended state. How can we suspend both time and this feeling? We're conditioned to think of cause and effect. We're conditioned to think of a storyline. We're conditioned to have a result, but if we can suspend time… It's multidirectional, and the breath is what allows time to be abundant or promising to the degree that it is encapsulated in a moment.

Oh, that's very helpful in terms of reading your poetry. The power of poetry is that it helps you imagine something other than what you feel constrained by. Your poetry does that because I was constantly asking, What's the story here?

Yes.

I know there's a story here, and then pausing would permit me to think a little bit more about that place and to try to emphasize it more. It challenged me to emphasize it more. To wrestle with it. So that's interesting.

Well, that's helpful for me to hear, because, in a sense, what's important for me is also the ways in which language creates moods that can suddenly shift in keeping with the fluctuating temperature of a room. 

For me, poems are spaces for movement, an act of taking place, even as what's most important remains in the background. In the foreground—of objects and people; the landscape—I’m given to intuitive connections that resist the syntactical structure of subject, verb, object. This is likely on account of my relationship to the visual arts—the simultaneity of sight—and a commitment to surrealist poetry and surrealist practice, invested in sensation and the sensorium. If we trust that sensation is irreducible to statement, and aligned rather to moods and place, to figures and configurations in contrast to plot lines.

I love this. Can you point us, maybe, to a poem where you felt like you got it there? Maybe it's “Carbonate of Copper,” but is there one in particular where you feel you were able to achieve that moment?

Well, I was leaning towards either “Carbonate of Copper” or another poem that might have …

I felt like you achieved it in your last section, “Puente Brownsville Matamoros.”

It was almost like a crescendo. The reader is getting into your rhythm of this aesthetic. I point to “Facsimile,” and “Entrance” as another.

“Entrance” is somewhat longer—I’m attached to this poem and others like it that endorse the feverish solitude of a self even as such privacy comes under siege. I want language to sound as though it were articulated, not only from the apparatus of the mouth, but from a person’s entire and unbroken configuration, deprived of sheltering environs or shielding aura. The psychic stakes and reverberations of what it means to be under surveillance, what it means to be a target. What it means to move through a space of persons dispossessed but extricated in the end by something akin to what we call hope.

Would you say that's the overall arc of the book?

Yes, that's one of the arcs of the book, a release from embodiment to a kind of deliverance.

We need deliverance and hope more than ever now.

I couldn't agree more. From the perspective of 2023, the year I completed the book, none of us could have imagined the ever-more dangerous world that we're living in now. To read these poems in relation to what's now taking place—the unthinkably obscene ICE raids, anonymous seizures, and deportations—is very upsetting.

These kidnappings are obscene. I read that they're taking away foster children from homes, right?

I got to interview m.s. Redcherries, who was recently shortlisted for the National Book Award for mother.  She made the argument, among others, that her book is not necessarily a book of poetry. It's a book of storytelling. Is it fair to characterize your book such that it's storytelling in a very different way that invites the reader to create this sound and in this world?

Yes.

In a sense, to see how to find empathy, but also to create their own sense of poetry. Is that fair to say?

Yes, I would have responded similarly, which is to say, I do believe in the ancient reckoning power of storytelling that, by way of repetition and recital modes, can connect us to larger movements and a more capacious sense of belonging. It involves, I hope, unburdening the self from the expectations of narrative structure, in a storytelling as open as… —the image that comes to mind now is the vastness of the desert itself.

Excellent.

Parts of the book were written in the desert. As an Angelino, I came to the Texas-Mexico borderlands with a Californian frame of reference: to the vast Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas and to the low subtropical terrain of the Rio Grande Valley—landscapes that make one feel absolutely insignificant and small. The seemingly endless grasslands around Marfa are disconcerting insofar as they bedevil one’s sense of orientation. I want a storytelling that so forfeits preconceived or preordained spatial markers as to go beyond and point further in those particular environs, as if across the vastness of a desert.

It's very easy to get lost in the desert, and yet you're found in the sense that you can find beauty in places that you never expected beauty to be. I love the desert because it is a great teacher. You have to be very attentive to finding beauty in that harsh place where you could die.

Absolutely. That's a disconcerting aspect—distance, in the common sense understanding of it, loses meaning in the desert. Artist friends from Houston—Matt Flores, Angel Lartigue, and Tere Garcia—made work in connection to the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurias, Texas, whose mission has been to identify the remains of migrants who die crossing the inhospitable terrain of Brooks County, weaponized by the State precisely to guarantee migrant deaths.

I just interviewed Hector Tobar, and he discussed how Jason De León's work demonstrates that it is intentional.

Absolutely.

To drive people so that they have to go through the desert instead of urban areas, and likely die.

Yes.

And die a horrible death!

One poem towards the end of the book, “Tunnel”, enacts a hallucination derived from certain haunting images. I was deeply troubled by descriptions of border patrol agents using helicopter searchlights in the dark of night with the aim of disbanding migrants who, once separated from the group, are destined to lose their way in the intolerable heat of the desert and die.

And in a sense, that poem centers the language of a particular kind of crossing. 

It came to me in a very nightmarish dream.

Yes, it is a nightmare.

Let's talk about the poetry pictures, “Carbonate of Copper,” the poem, and then end with any advice you have for emerging writers, poets, and others who are trying to work in this field of writing.

How did you come across these photos? Did you already know about them?

I did, and I didn't. So I often consult photography collections, including online digital archives at the L.A. Public Library, UCLA, the J. Paul Getty,  the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress, among others. And I've composed similar visual poems or visual essays in previous books.

So, having completed this book, I was reminded of the Farm Security Administration archive. The Farm Security Administration, or FSA, was a US Government program in the days of the Great Depression that employed artists and photographers like Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and Dorothea Lange, who later became landmarks in U.S. photography. It employed them to go out on the one hand to places that hadn't been documented and whose life worlds had been impacted by the Depression as a way that could affect policy in Washington. So I had seen one or two FSA images that were made in the Rio Grande Valley. And then I began to do my research after I finished the book. I realized there were extraordinary images made by these important photographers, and I wanted to assemble them in a way that told a parallel story. 

Again, storytelling by other means, and for me, the poems can be read—and there is, I believe, a very assertive narrative in the sixteen images that tell a story of what the life world was like in the Rio Grande Valley from 1939 to 1942, as viewed by outsiders. These were white photographers, but they were humanitarians seeking an insider-outsider perspective. That is also reflected in my own position as a guest in the Rio Grande Valley. My hope is for the photographs, which come at the book’s midpoint, to invite the reader to dwell in poems very much set in the present but also simultaneous with the past.

How do these images point back and forth across time and to each other? I look at these photographs now and speculate through a form of time-travel capable of altering the ways in which the U.S. has conveniently crafted a narrative about its neighbors to the south. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government enacted the mass “repatriation” of Mexican descendant people—many of whom were U.S. citizens—through anti-immigration raids and intimidation tactics intended to prompt “voluntary” deportation. Afterwards, from 1942 to 1964, the United States legislated a temporary labor initiative that allowed Mexican nationals to be employed as guest workers. These facts reside beyond the frame of those photographs, but speak directly to our present-day real-time images of ICE agents and other masked thugs bent on kidnapping people off the streets in broad daylight. It's absolutely horrifying.

All the more pressing to uplift and celebrate the life world of the Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, and Tejanos depicted in the FSA photographs of 1939-1942, folks who lived and enjoyed leisure time with friends and family in community, a form of convivio in the Rio Grande Valley.

I'm so glad I asked that question. And it ties in so well to your idea, that is the first line from Pauline Oliveros. You know about making sound and seeing what's made of it.

Exactly.

I love that. That's really great. Okay, how about “Carbonate of Copper”?

The term carbonate of copper became a talisman for me. It was the first poem that suggested the degree to which I was attuned to the omnipresent technological forms of surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border. So the poem speaks of the wireless ether and shapes predictive in the wireless ether, imagery derived as much from the mass media as from dream states and reverie. The poem points back to colonial residues in Mexico—the remnants of a sugar mill hacienda—as well as to the infrastructure today of radar, infrared cameras, and long-range sensors deployed by a border industrial complex. How does one sing again from a place still plagued by the past and distressed in the present? For me, then, carbonate of copper conjured a spell-like property, the promise of possibilities for superseding the determinations of history.

Fantastic. I'm very grateful to you for your answers and time. You've devoted your whole life to writing not just poems, but essays and teaching. What advice would you give to those who want to live a creative life?

Well, for someone of my generation, any advice I have is irrelevant at this point, in that the verdict is still out regarding the material impact of language models and neural networks on the creative imagination, delivery systems, and the raging battle for everyone’s attention. I would modestly offer the notion of a practice committed to attention and of a sustainable community given to that purpose, like the kind activated, for example, around The Friends of Attention and the Strother School of Radical Attention, a loosely associated network of writers, artists, thinkers, and individuals who are keenly invested in the importance of attention, and what they call attention activism.

Poets are in the business of attention, and the real-life stakes are higher than ever, especially if you believe that the human faculty of the imagination and the transvaluation that languages enable are unique sites for stewarding the meaningfully new and heretofore unthought-of. How can we so improvise together in the conviviality of the imaginable? I would definitely recommend the writings of Pauline Oliveros, beginning with her Sonic Meditations. 

That's fantastic, Roberto Tejada, thank you so much.

Thank you, Rey. I really appreciate it.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.