The UA Prose Series, curated by faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the UA, presents prose writers of distinction.
The UA Poetry Center is proud to present Rubén Martínez.
A native of Los Angeles and the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, Rubén Martínez is a writer, performer and teacher and one of the country’s leading Latino voices across a variety of mediums and genres.
He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University, and is an artist in residence at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. He is the author of: Desert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape (Metropolitan/Holt), Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Metropolitan/Holt), The New Americans(New Press) and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (Vintage).
As a musician, he has collaborated with Grammy-winning musicians like Quetzal and La Marisoul of La Santa Cecilia, Los Illegals, Concrete Blonde and the Roches. He is the host of the VARIEDADES “performance salon” at the Echo club in Los Angeles, “variety” shows that focus on topical themes. “The Ballad of Ricardo Flores Magón,” a full-length multimedia work he wrote about the most famous Mexican anarchist most Americans have never heard of, featured L.A.’s Latino musical luminaries, including Ceci Bastadi, Quetzal, Los Illegals, La Marisoul of La Santa Cecilia, the Entre Mujeres supergroup, and Chicano Son. The show was filmed and broadcast by KCETLink television.
An Emmy Award-winning journalist with over two decades of experience in print, broadcast and online media, he hosted and co-wrote the feature-length documentary film about the first century after contact between Europe and the New World, When Worlds Collide, shot on location throughout Latin America and Spain, for PBS. He won an Emmy Award for hosting KCET-TV’s politics and culture series, “Life & Times.”
His essays, opinions and reportage have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boom: A Journal of California, Salon, Village Voice, The Nation, Spin, Sojourners, and Mother Jones. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, a Freedom of Information Award from the ACLU and a Greater Press Club of Los Angeles Award of Excellence.
The UA Prose Series is sponsored by the Department of English, the MFA in Creative Writing, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Poets & Writers, High Country News, and the Institute for the Environment, with support from Alison Hawthorne Deming and the Agnes Nelms Haury Program.The UA Prose Series, curated by faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the UA, presents prose writers of distinction.
