AWP was saddened to learn late that Francisco X. Alarcón passed away on January 15. The cause of death was cancer. He was 61. Alarcón was scheduled to appear on the panel “In Celebration of Poetry of Resistance: A Multicultural Response to Arizona SB 1070, Xenophobia, and Injustice” at the upcoming AWP Conference in Los Angeles.

Alarcón was the author of several books of poetry for adults and children, including Tattoos (1985), his first, and Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992), winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His other honors included the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award.

At the time of his death, he was a lecturer of Spanish and the director of the Spanish for Native Speakers program at the University of California, Davis.

A few days after his passing, NPR’s All Things Considered aired a story about Alarcón, featuring commentary about him from US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Adrian Florido, and Francisco Aragon, who said of Alarcón, “Among Chicano poets, he's among a handful who, in addition to being excellent practitioners of their art, also managed, through their art, to give a rich portrait of the contemporary Chicano movement.”

Read some of Alarcón’s work over at the Poetry Foundation, as well as the Academy of American Poets’ profile of him.

Photo credit: via Poetry Foundation