Since 1981, when he received the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award for Whispering to Fool the Wind (published in 1982), Alberto Ríos has been assured an important position in American literature. Ríos has been heralded as the major practitioner of the baroque in the Southwest, as the most articulate poetic voice of the American language in the 1980s, as the most technically sophisticated and complex poet from the borderlands, and even as the one on whose shoulders has fallen the mantle of genius previously worn by Lorna Dee Cervantes and Gary Soto. No matter how exaggerated these evaluations might seem, Ríos is surely one of the major vernacular voices in the postmodernist age. It is as a poet that he assumes his important position. However, Ríos also writes lyrically dazzling short stories.

Born on 18 September 1952 in Nogales, Arizona, Rí...