Award: Research & Development Grant
Discipline: Literary Arts
Project Collaborator(s):
Like its namesake, The Cries of La Corrida is a convergence of contradiction, the reconciliation of memory and mortality, celebration and cruelty, and performance and pain.
Excerpt from Ernesto L. Abeytia’s R&D Grant application
Inspired in part by la corrida de toros, the Spanish bullfight, and its spectacle of death, The Cries of La Corrida is a nuanced examination of life and loss, impermanence and displacement. The subject matter is intensely personal to Abeytia.
“As a Spanish-American writer growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border,” Abeytia wrote in his application, “my creative and scholarly works regularly consider identity and place, and how they inform one-another. And yet, my Basque heritage, the origin of my family’s name, the unseen influences of a culture I’ve never known—those facets of my identity remain a mystery.”
The poet’s exploration of these facets gained an additional tragic dimension with the recent unexpected death of his sister.
“While contending with my sister’s passing, I feel an urgency to interrogate those aspects of our shared lives and our foreign homeland she will never know.”
Work Samples
Originally published in Zócalo Public Square
“The Port City of Cádiz, Andalucía”
Originally published in Fugue, Issue 55
Ernesto L. Abeytia is a Spanish-American poet and teacher. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MA in English from St. Louis University, and an MA in Anglo/North-American Cultural and Literary Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid in Madrid, Spain.
His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, PBS NewsHour, The Shallow Ends, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. His book reviews and essays can be found in Hayden’s Ferry Review and the anthology Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making, among other venues. He has presented his research and led workshops at various conferences, including The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, the Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities, ASU’s Día de Los Niños/Día de Los Libros Celebration, ASU’s Young Adult Writing Program, and Phoenix Fan Fusion. He has taught Film, Poetry, Composition and Rhetoric, and other writing and literature courses, and is a frequent panel moderator, guest lecturer, creative writing judge, and community programs coordinator, fundraiser, and facilitator.
Ernesto has received grants and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, St. Louis University, and Arizona Humanities, where he is a Humanities Scholar. He currently teaches for The Writers’ Studio at Arizona State University.
Artist photo by María Isabel Álvarez
