News

Villa, mapa en fragmentos. 

• Un cortometraje realizado por alumnos de nuestra Maestría en Escritura Creativa en UTEP con colaboración de la Feria del Libro de la Frontera en Ciudad Juárez y el apoyo especial del College of Liberal Arts; que fuera seleccionado en competencia por el Festival de Cine Contemporáneo Black Canvas de la Ciudad de México. Cinco textos sobre Pancho Villa: Iliana Pichardo, Huliet Moreno, Zazil Collins, Yoshimar Maceda, Mayela De Velázquez F; con fotografía de Alan Esparza y realización audiovisual de Facundo Torrieri.

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Zazil Collins 

• Zazil Collins ha publicado los libros Junkie de nada, No todas las islas (Premio Poesía Ciudad de La Paz 2011), El corazón, tan cerca de la boca, Sipofene, y recientemente Omen (Valparaíso, 2023); coeditó el proyecto bilingüe Músicos en la Ciudad de México/Musicians in Mexico City. Es parte de la Antología general de la poesía mexicana: De la segunda mitad del siglo XX al tercer milenio. Actualmente, cursa el M.F.A en Escritura creativa bilingüe en la Universidad de Texas. Web: zazilcollins.com/.

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Erik Fernández Pozo

• Published the novel: El niño que quería creer en la magia (Mesa Redonda, Perú, 2022) https://editorialmesaredonda.com/infantiljuvenil/237-el-nino-que-queria-creer-en-la-magia-.html

Ana Llurba

• Published the poetry collection: Hemoderivadas (Editorial Aristas Martínez, España, 2022)

Julio Barrera

• Instant Exposure: A Habit of Documenting pairs Polaroids taken by Andy Warhol between 1975 and 1986 with Polaroids taken by El Paso-based artists Beatrice Macias-Caballero and Julio Barrera. Julio Barrera uses them as a visual diary, capturing strangers walking down the street and other neighborhood happenings. Project Space

  July 11 – August 19, 2023

  Curated by Ramon Cardenas, Assistant Curator of Practice. Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visuals Arts.

Iliana Pichardo

• Awarded the Tom Lea Research Fellows Program 2022 https://www.tomlea.com/fellowship
• Awarded the 2022 AAUW (American Association of University Women) Career Development Grant Recipient https://ww3.aauw.org/aauw_check/fellowships_directory/#rid6788
• “Prótesis” in SmokeLong Quarterly https://www.smokelong.com/stories/protesis/

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Germán Barrera Toro

• Published the novel: Hace días que llueve mierda (Ediciones Alfar, España, 2022): https://hacediasquelluevemierda.com/

Julio Barrera Moreno

• El Paso, Texas. 2022 with Our Absent men (Colombia, 2021). https://elpasofilmfestival.org/festival/2022#winnersP

  Winner of Best Documentary Short Film at El Paso Film Festival.

Eric Ponce

• Awarded the Merrill Moore Prize for Fiction, 2022
• Ongoing critical reviews published in BookPage Magazine: https://www.bookpage.com/contributor/eric-ponce/

Zita Arocha

• Winner of the 2021 Eilud Martínez Prize given by the Inlandia Institue for her memoir Guajira: the Cuba Girl, her MFA thesis. https://inlandiainstitute.org/eliud-martinez-prize-2021-winner/

• Professor José de Piérola, in collaboration with Sun Cok, published a translation of Dracula by Bram Stoker with Lluvia Editores.

• Current Online MFA's student Ana Lucía Cagnoli was awarded third place in the Concurso de Letras del Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Argentina) for her book Media y extrema razón. More info, here.
• Former CRW Master Program's student Saúl Hernández won the 2021 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize.
• Former CRW Master Program's student María Isabel Pachón Varón won the Premio Internacional de Novela Breve “Rosario Castellanos” 2021 by her novel Sobre tierra quemada.

Foto: María Ramos Pacheco

• Former CRW Master Program's student David Cruz won the Premio Internacional Manuel Acuña 2020 by his poetry book Lazarus. To read The Prospector interview, click here.

• Current CRW Master Program's student Alaíde Ventura won the Premio Maurizio Achar by her novel Entre los rotos. Read an interview here.

• To foster the appreciation and practice of writing, the Department of Creative Writing is launching its “2020 Bilingual Creative Writing Awards.” The competition, open to all graduate students, will accept original, unpublished work. The prizes will include a monetary award, an award letter, and publication. 

         
           Foto: Andrés D'Elia

• Colombian writer Óscar Godoy Barbosa, former CRW Master Program's student, recently won the Premio Ñ-Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2019 by his last novel Te acuerdas del mar awarded by the prestigious Argentinian journal Clarín. This book addresses the life as a sequel of the guerrilla violence and its implications.

• Very recently, Professor Paula Cucurella has had the opportunity of presenting parts of the research for her book (tentative title: Poetry in Times of War. The Literary Maxim) at The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual conference.  Some poems and paintings from Dr. Cucurella’s first —and still unpublished—poetry book were published on the online literary magazine Marcapiel, issued recently in February. In the same magazine, Cucurella published  an interview with David Johnson (University of New York at Buffalo). In addition, with occasion of the anniversary of Nicanor Parra’s death, the Chilean news site  eldesconcierto.cl, published Cucurella's column“La Antipoesía: una poesía pasivo-agresiva”, where she highlights the sexist and homophobic aspects of Nicanor Parra's poetry

• Professor  Lex   Williford was recently chosen as a Mentor for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) for Spring 2019. AWP's mentorship program, Writer to Writer, matches emerging writers and published authors for a three-month series of modules on topics such as craft, revision, publishing, and the writing life.  Prof.  Williford  has also served two years as a member of the Fellows Council for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), which serves as a point of communication between Fellows and the VCCA board and administration, advising the board regarding matters of vital importance to Fellows in residence.

• Prof.  Williford ’s novella,  Balsa and Tissue Paper,  is also forthcoming in Fall 2019 as a  Ploughshares  Solo, both as an ebook and part of the long-form perfect-bound edition of  Ploughshares , edited by Ladette Randolph, who founded the series to create a venue for writers of novellas and longer-form creative nonfiction

• Professor Sasha Pimentel, from CRW Program, has been awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment of the Arts, which supports our nation’s poets and encourages a wide range of voices and styles.

• Our professors Rosa Alcala, and Tim Hernandez were inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL), a nonprofit honor society that recognizes and celebrates literature in Texas. Induction is based on literary accomplishments, according to the group’s website. The TIL’s elected membership consists of the state’s most respected writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism  and  scholarship.