Ríos, Alberto 1952–

(Alberto Alvaro Ríos)

PERSONAL: Born September 18, 1952, in Nogales, AZ; son of Alberto Alvaro (a justice of the peace) and Agnes (a nurse; maiden name, Fogg) Ríos; married Maria Guadalupe Barron (a librarian), September 8, 1979; children: Joaquin. Education: University of Arizona, B.A. (English literature and creative writing), 1974, B.A. (psychology), 1975, M.F.A., 1979; attended law school at the University of Arizona, 1975–76. Politics: "Liberal/Democrat." Religion: "Cultural Catholic."

ADDRESSES: Home—3038 N. Pennington Dr., Chandler, AZ 85224. Office—Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287. E-mail—aarios@asu.edu.

CAREER: Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix, artist in Artists-in-Education Program, 1978–83, consultant, 1983–; Arizona State University, Tempe, assistant professor, 1982–85, associate professor, 1985–89, professor, 1989–94, Regents' Professor of English, 1994–, cochair of Hispanic Research and Development Committee, 1983–, director, Creative Writing Program, 1986–89. Counselor and instructor in English and algebra in Med-Start Program at University of Arizona, summers, 1977–80. Writer-in-residence at Central Arizona College, Coolidge, 1980–82. Board of directors, Associated Writing Programs, 1988–, secretary, 1989–; board of directors, Arizona Center for the Book, 1988–, vice chairman, 1989–. Member of National Advisory Committee to the National Artists-in-Education Program, 1980; member of grants review panel, Arizona Commission on the Arts, 1983; member, National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Panel. Judge of New York City High School Poetry Contest. Gives poetry readings, lectures, and workshops.

AWARDS, HONORS: First place in Academy of American Arts poetry contest, 1977, for "A Man Then Suddenly Stops Moving"; writer's fellowship in poetry from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, 1979; fellowship grant in creative writing from National Endowment for the Arts, 1980; Walt Whitman Award from the National Academy of American Poets, 1981, for Whispering to Fool the Wind; second place in New York Times annual fiction award competition, 1983, for "The Way Spaghetti Feels"; Western States Book Award (fiction), 1984, for The Iguana Killer; New Times Fiction Award, 1983; Pushcart Prize for fiction, 1986, and poetry, 1988, 1989; Chicanos Por La Causa Community Appreciation Award, 1988; National Book Award nominee in poetry category, 2002, for The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body; Distinguished Achievement Award, Western Literature Association, 2002.

WRITINGS:

Elk Heads on the Wall (poetry chapbook), Mango Press (San Jose, CA), 1979.

Sleeping on Fists (poetry chapbook), Dooryard Press (Story, WY), 1981.

Whispering to Fool the Wind (poetry), Sheep Meadow (New York, NY), 1982.

The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart, Blue Moon/Confluence (Lewiston, ID), 1984.

Five Indiscretions (poetry), Sheep Meadow (New York, NY), 1985.

The Lime Orchard Woman: Poems, Sheep Meadow (New York, NY), 1988.

The Warrington Poems, Pyracantha Press (Tempe, AZ), 1989.

Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses, Norton (New York, NY), 1990.

Pig Cookies and Other Stories, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 1995.

The Curtain of Trees: Stories, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1999.

Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1999.

The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (poetry), Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2002.

Contributor of poetry, fiction, and drama to anthologies, including Southwest: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Karl Kopp and Jane Kopp, Red Earth Press, 1977; Hispanics in the United States: An Anthology of Creative Literature, edited by Gary D. Keller and Francisco Jimenez, Bilingual Review Press, 1980; The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann, Robert O' Clair, and John Benedict, Norton, 1988; and American Literature, Prentice-Hall, 1990. Contributor to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Little Magazine, Bloomsbury Review, and Paris Review. Also contributor of translations to New Kauri and Poetry Pilot. Corresponding editor, Manoa, 1989–; editorial board, New Chicano Writing, 1990–.

ADAPTATIONS: Ríos's poetry has been set to music in "Toto's Say," by James DeMars, and "Away from Home," EMI.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel "about a married couple who move to Arizona from Mexico."

SIDELIGHTS: Alberto Ríos has won acclaim as a writer who uses language in lyrical and unexpected ways in both his poems and short stories, which reflect his Chicano heritage and contain elements of magical realism. "Ríos's poetry is a kind of magical storytelling, and his stories are a kind of magical poetry," commented Jose David Saldivar in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ríos grew up in a Spanish-speaking family but was forced to speak English in school, leading him to develop a third language, "one that was all our own," as he described it. Ríos once commented, "I have been around other languages all my life, particularly Spanish, and have too often thought of the act of translation as simply giving something two names. But it is not so, not at all. Rather than filling out, a second name for something pushes it forward, forward and backward, and gives it another life."

Saldivar wrote of Ríos, "Many of his important early poems dramatize the essence of this uncanny third language." There are examples of these in the prizewinning collection Whispering to Fool the Wind, which contains poems that Mary Logue, writing in the Voice Literary Supplement, called "written miracles" that "carry the feel of another world." These poems, she noted, are informed by his upbringing in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, "where one is neither in this country nor the other."

Saldivar explained that Ríos tells stories in verse, something that many writers have been unable to do successfully. Ríos, however, is able to bring to life characters such as a man who dies of anger when a seamstress refuses to give him pins with which to display his butterfly collection. "Throughout Whispering to Fool the Wind magical-realist events are related with the greatest of accuracy without being forced on the reader," Saldivar wrote. "It is left up to readers to interpret things for themselves in a way that is most familiar to them."

Saldivar deemed "Nani," about Ríos's grandmother, the best poem in the collection "and one of the most remarkable poems in Chicano literature." It "captures the reality of the invented third language," he said, with lines such as "'To speak, now-foreign words I used to speak, too, dribble down her mouth…. By the stove she does something with words and looks at me only with her back.'" Logue also praised the poet's unusual use of language, observing that "Ríos's tongue is both foreign and familiar, but always enchanting."

In Five Indiscretions, "most of the poems achieve a level of excellence not far below the peak moments of [Ríos's] earlier poetry," Saldivar asserted. Almost all of these poems deal with romantic and sexual relationships between men and women, with the poet taking both male and female viewpoints. This collection has "regrettably … not received the acclaim and attention it deserves," Saldivar opined. "The few book reviews, however, praised his ability to represent gender issues and his use of the American language."

Ríos's award-winning book of short stories, The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart, contains tales "explor[ing] the luminous world of his childhood and border culture," Saldivar related. The title story centers on a young Mexican boy who uses a baseball bat to become his country's leading iguana killer. "The Birthday of Mrs. Pineda" is about an oppressed wife who finally gets a chance to speak for herself. This and "The Way Spaghetti Feels" are, in Saldivar's estimate, "the best stories in the book"; he commented that they "border on the metafictional and magical-realist impulse in postmodern fiction."

These characteristics also are evident in the 1995 work Pig Cookies and Other Stories, set in a small Mexican town where cookies exhibit supernatural powers and life takes other surprising twists and turns. "The tales in this collection glisten with a magical sheen, at once other-worldly and real," remarked Greg Sanchez in World Literature Today. "Ríos takes us from the realm of imagination to the concrete and back again with surprising fluidity." Ríos also creates winning characters, wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer: "These poignant, funny tales of the rich, unsuspected lives of regular folks transcend time and place." In 1999 Ríos published a collection titled The Curtain of Trees: Stories, which focuses on residents of small towns along the border of Arizona and Mexico. A Publishers Weekly critic stated that the "characters are from another era (circa the 1950s), roaming the unpaved streets of small villages, their lives made vividly real through the author's powerful sensitivity and sharp eye for detail."

Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, "a monologue that is funny, intimate, and as sweet as a candy placed in your palm by a friend," according to Booklist critic GraceAnne A. DeCandido, appeared in 1999. In Capirotada, Ríos describes his experiences growing up in Nogales, Arizona, which shared a border with its sister city of Nogales, Mexico. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the work "an extremely personal family history filled with small anecdotes and finely drawn landscapes." In Library Journal, Gwen Gregory remarked, "This well-balanced narrative recalls the universal experiences of childhood and unique personal reminiscences of the author."

The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a 2002 collection of poems, "focuses squarely on childhood experiences and memories," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Poems like "My Chili" and "Chinese Food in the Fifties" celebrate local dining customs, and "Gray Dogs" is one of several poems that contain animal imagery. According to Robert Murray Davis in World Literature Today, Ríos "is most successful … when, on the one hand, he does not strive too hard for paradox and, on the other, when he does not take refuge in mere nostalgia." The book's title, taken from the poem "Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science," refers to the stapedius muscle in the ear, which prevents humans from hearing their own heartbeat. "The muscle does important work I think, but at the same time, it keeps us from something that belongs to us," Ríos told Leslie A. Wootten in World Literature Today. "We are protected from particular sounds for our own good. There are many things in life we are protected from hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and feeling. In large measure, the poems in this book—and all my books—struggle to bring into view what we've been protected from experiencing. But by this, I mean the small things as well as the large."

Indeed, while Ríos's Chicano heritage informs his writing and while he is one of that culture's important voices, his work "is anything but narrow and exclusive," contended Robert McDowell in an essay for Contemporary Poets. Ríos, McDowell said, is dedicated "to finding, declaring, and celebrating the diversity and power of community in the experience of those around him. Thus, his vision is more outward directed, less private than might at first glance be apparent." Saldivar added that "Ríos is surely one of the major vernacular voices in the postmodern age."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Poets, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 122: Chicano Writers, Second Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Poetry for Students, Volume 11, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, October, 1993, John Jacob, "Androgyny's Whisper."

Americas Review, fall-winter, 1996, William Barillas, "Words Like the Wind: An Interview with Alberto Ríos," pp. 116-129.

Bloombury Review, January-February, 1996, Leslie A. Wootten, "Writing on the Edge: An Interview with Alberto Alvaro Ríos."

Booklist, October 15, 1999, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, p. 411.

Confluencia, fall, 1990, Lupe Cárdenas and Justo Alarcón, "Entrevista: An Interview with Alberto Ríos," p. 119.

Glimmer Train, spring, 1998, Susan McInnis, "Interview with Alberto Ríos," pp. 105-121.

Hayden's Ferry Review, fall-winter, 1992, Deneen Jenks, "The Breathless Patience of Alberto Rios," pp. 115-123.

Library Journal, October 1, 1999, Gwen Gregory, review of Capirotada, p. 120.

New York Times Book Review, February 9, 1986; September 17, 1995, p. 25.

Publishers Weekly, March 20, 1995, review of Pig Cookies and Other Stories, p. 54; April 26, 1999, review of The Curtain of Trees, p. 55; August 30, 1999, review of Capirotada, p. 62; April 29, 2002, review of The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, pp. 65-66.

Research, spring-summer, 1997, Sheilah Britton, "Discovering the Alphabet of Life: An Interview with Alberto Ríos," pp. 38-41.

South Carolina Review, fall, 2001, Timothy S. Sedore, "An American Borderer: An Interview with Alberto Ríos," pp. 7-17.

Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1982.

World Literature Today, spring, 1996, Greg Sanchez, review of Pig Cookies and Other Stories, p. 415; July-September, 2003, Leslie A. Wootten, "The Edge in the Middle: An Interview with Alberto Ríos," pp. 57-60, and Robert Murray Davis, review of The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, p. 105.

ONLINE

Academy of American Poets Web site, http://www.poets.org/poets/ (July 9, 2004), "Alberto Ríos."

Arizona State University Web Site, http://www.public.asu.edu/∼aarios/ (August 10, 2004), "Alberto Ríos."