Zepeda chosen as March 2015’s “Author of the Month” on Houston Public Media
Houston Public Media radio host Eric Ladau interviewed Zepeda for its website’s “Arte Público Press Author of the Month” feature, and along with the transcript, their conversation is available to listeners on the station’s interactive site through on-demand audio streaming here.
Click here to see all Arte Público authors featured on Houston Public Media.
If you ask Houston author Gwendolyn Zepeda about her proudest experience as Houston’s first poet laureate, she’ll probably tell you about the time she cried.
In a good way.
“We did a four-week workshop here at the downtown central library and at the end of it, one person told me that she had taken a lot of poetry classes in her life and that mine was the first one where she actually felt that she had learned something and she felt that she could go forward and write poetry on her own,” Zepeda said. “And that kind of made me cry.”
About the Author:
GWENDOLYN ZEPEDA, Houston’s first poet laureate, is the author of several books for adults and children. She is the author of two poetry collections, Monsters, Zombies and Addicts (Arte Público Press, 2015) and Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners (Arte Público Press, 2013); a short story collection, To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (Arte Público Press, 2004); three novels, Better with You Here (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), Lone Star Legend (Grand Central Publishing, 2010) and Houston, We Have a Problema (Grand Central Publishing, 2009); and four bilingual picture books for children, Level Up / Paso de nivel (Piñata Books, 2012), I Kick the Ball / Pateo el balón (Piñata Books, 2011), Sunflowers / Girasoles (Piñata Books, 2009) and Growing Up with Tamales / Los tamales de Ana (Piñata Books, 2008). Born and raised in Houston, Texas, her writing was hailed by EFE newswire as having the “potential to transform Latino literature of recent years and rid it of its bad habits and clichés.”