Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

Mauricio Alberto Kilwein Guevara (born 1961) is a writer, translator, performer, activist, and educator born in Belencito, Colombia and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2002, he was the first person of Latino heritage elected as President of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). He has won national and international awards for his writing, including the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition (Postmortem, 1992) and an International Latino Book Award (POEMA, 2010). Across genres, he is known for a seriocomic writing style that investigates the overlapping of voices, experiences, and tensions that complicate immigrant life in the United States and throughout the global Latin American diaspora. He is a professor of English and the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Early life and education Kilwein Guevara was born in 1961 in Belencito, Colombia, a small Andean town 210 kilometers (130 miles) northwest of Bogotá, to John Kilwein (a social worker and, later, educator) and Beatriz Guevara Kilwein (a homemaker and, later, bilingual secretary). His father was born in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression. Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, his mother emigrated from Bogotá, Colombia in 1963. At the age of two, Kilwein Guevara moved with his parents and brothers from Colombia to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, first living with his paternal grandparents in the Hazelwood neighborhood, then home to the Jones and Laughlin Coke Works. Of those early experiences, Kilwein Guevara has noted:

I was six or seven and listening to the immigrants and the natives and the migrants (some transplants from Germany, Italy, Colombia, Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Jim Crow Alabama, Mississippi, and Mexico by way of Weirton, West Virginia). To speak with an accent, to speak another language, to coexist giddily with tongues I didn't understand, to listen for tenor, to study how people laughed at the deli or pointed at the bread counter, to imitate how we learn to injure or sooth, to laugh or cry, this was quotidian.

By the age of seven, Kilwein Guevara and his family had resided in six different rental properties in Latin America, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Eventually by the mid-1970s his family was able to take up permanent residence in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, where Kilwein Guevara graduated from high school in 1979.

From 1979 to 1983, Kilwein Guevara attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he double-majored in English Writing and Behavioral Psychology. While a student, he was hired by the Hillman Library to work the circulation desk of the Spoken Arts Collection. He has written that this job was formative: "In Hillman I also heard recordings of Neruda, Eliot, Plath, Sexton, Martin Luther King Jr., Delmore Schwartz, e.e.cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden and Frost."

Kilwein Guevara's aesthetic, as described by the literary critic Michael Dowdy, is "scavenger Infrapoetics" where poems "emerge from materialist and ecological conceptions of language" and employ "surrealist, magic realist, and vanguardist practices.

Kilwein Guevara's first collection of poetry, Postmortem, was published in 1994 by the University of Georgia Press and was nominated for the National Book Award. It was one of two winning selections for the Contemporary Poetry Series judged by Lynn Emanuel. The other was Susan Wheeler's Bag 'O' Diamonds. Publishers Weekly called Postmortem "a captivating view of immigration…Guevara's vivid use of color binds him to all those estranged from their homeland." His debut collection highlighted the complex and interrelated histories of violence that have united Colombia and the United States of America.

Kilwein Guevara's Poems of the River Spirit was published in 1996 by the Pitt Poetry Series. John Bradley, writing in Rain Taxi, notes that "[Kilwein Guevara] takes autobiographical material and imaginatively recasts it into something of nearly mythical proportions."

Kilwein Guevara's POEMA was published by The University of Arizona Press as part of their Camino del Sol Latino Literature Series in 2009. Author Pablo Medina called POEMA "a necessary book for our time… the work of a mature and remarkably gifted poet."

Poet and critic Francisco Aragón, writing for The Latin American Review of Books, stated: "POEMA establishes the Colombian-born Guevara as the most 'Latin American' of Latino poets in the United States, if not simply one of our most cosmopolitan poets, period."

Poema According to Kilwein Guevara, poema (Spanish for poem) is "a miniaturist form, especially the combustible lyric… the tinier the space, the greater the poem's expansive energy." For Kilwein Guevara:

Poema feels and is thought by the human body. Poema hunts and is haunted. Cut a line of poema open and it glows optic red. Poema spreads by capillary effect… It involves pain, like torn muscle between ribs. Poema celebrates joy and dolor and boredom. It is many tongued, polytropos. In collaboration with colleagues Mike Sell, Barbara Blackledge, and Brian Jones, Kilwein Guevara staged a black-box performance of Autobiography of So-and-so at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 2010, he published a book of literary translations in Madrid, Spain with Travesías Ediciones. With research from a Fulbright grant to Ecuador, Kilwein Guevara traveled to do research for a novel entitled The Thieves of Guevara.

Activism Kilwein Guevara has been involved in labor organizing (as an elected officer with the American Federation of Teachers Local 3535), community organizing, language arts education in public schools, and in political resistance campaigns (the Wisconsin Uprising and the unsuccessful campaign to unseat Governor Scott Walker through a recall effort).

Career as an educator Kilwein Guevara has held numerous teaching positions across North and Latin America: Bowling Green State University (Ohio), Florida State University (Tallahassee), Marquette University (Milwaukee), Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá), Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla), Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Vermont College (Montpelier), and since 2003 as Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he directs the Doctoral Program in Creative Writing

Published works