S4:E32 Matt Sedillo with Victoria Bañales

In this episode, Matt Sedillo takes on the Western canon, discussing how many of the literary greats, such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, disparaged Mexico/Mexicans. In his poems, Matt reclaims Chicanx/Latinx/Indigenous literary traditions and histories.

Matt Sedillo has been described by critics as the “best political poet in America” as well as “the poet laureate of the struggle.” Sedillo was the recipient of the 2017 Joe Hill Labor Poetry award, a panelist at the 2020 Texas book festival, and a participant in the 2011 San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and the 2022 Elba Poetry Festival. Sedillo has appeared on CSPAN and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Axios, and the Associated Press, among other publications. Sedillo has spoken at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, at numerous conferences and forums, such as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education, the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies, the Left Forum, the US Social Forum, and at over a hundred universities and colleges, including the University of Cambridge, among many others. Matt Sedillo is the author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019) and City on the Second Floor (FlowerSong Press, 2022). Sedillo is the current literary director of The Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.

Matt Sedillo’s website

‘THE POET LAUREATE OF THE STRUGGLE’: WHY MATT SEDILLO IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE BEST POLITICAL POETS IN AMERICA

PROLETARIAN POETRY RETURNS: A REVIEW OF MATT SEDILLO’S ‘CITY ON THE SECOND FLOOR’

I, Like You, Am Made of Stars: Matt Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s