Roberto José Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections that include Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), and Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish-language translation. His book of essays, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019) is a Latinx poetics on colonial settlement and cultural counter-conquest in art and writing of the Americas. He founded the multi-lingual literary journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas (Mexico-U.S., 1991-2013), co-edited with Kristin Dykstra and Gabriel Bernal Granados; the sixteen issues of the journal are available in digital form at Northwestern University’s Open Door Archive.  An art historian, Tejada writes on cross-cultural media and the political imagination in books that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), as well as catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and The Menil Collection’s Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021). He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

Photo Credit: Michael C. Bryan