Jimmy Santiago Baca | |
|---|---|
 Baca during the videotaping of Add-Verse, 2004 | |
| Born | January 2, 1952 Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Notable works | Martin and Meditations on the South Valley |
| Notable awards | American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, International Hispanic Heritage Award, International Award. |
| Spouse | Married |
| Website | |
| www | |
Jimmy Santiago Baca (born January 2, 1952) is an American poet, memoirist, and screenwriter from New Mexico. [1] [2]
Baca was born in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, in 1952. Abandoned by his parents at the age of two, he lived with one of his grandmothers for several years before being placed in an orphanage. At the age of 13 he ran away and wound up living on the streets. When he was 21, he was convicted on charges of drug possession and incarcerated. He served five years in prison, [3] three of them in isolation, and having expressed a desire to go to school (the guards considered this dangerous), he was put in the same area of the prison with the inmates on death row for a period of time before he was released. [4]
During this time, Baca taught himself to read and write, and he began to compose poetry. He sold these poems to fellow inmates in exchange for cigarettes. A fellow inmate convinced him to submit some of his poems to the magazine Mother Jones , then edited by Denise Levertov. Levertov printed Baca's poems and began corresponding with him, eventually finding a publisher for his first book. [5]
Immigrants in Our Own Land, Baca's first major collection, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1979. [6] This early collection included "I Am Offering This Poem," [7] a poem later reprinted in 1990's Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems [8] and anthologized in The Seagull Book of Poems [9] . In 1987, his semi-autobiographical minor epic in verse, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley , received the American Book Award for poetry, bringing Baca international acclaim and, in 1989, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. [10]
In 2004 Baca started a non-profit organization, Cedar Tree, Inc., that supports literary workshops for inmates and troubled youth, through charitable donations. As well as writing workshops, Cedar Tree has produced two documentary films Clamor en Chino and Moving the River Back Home. The organization employs ex-offenders as interns. [11]
Baca's poetry collections include C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans: Dream Boy's Story (Grove Press, 2002), Healing Earthquakes (2001), Set This Book on Fire (1999), In the Way of the Sun (1997), Black Mesa Poems (1995), Poems Taken from My Yard (1986), and What's Happening (1982). His "memoir", A Place to Stand (2001), chronicles his troubled youth and the five-year jail-stint that brought about his personal transformation. The poet Will Inman published Mr. Baca's poetry in his 1977 anthology Fired Up with You: Poems of a Niagara Vision (Border Press), one of the earliest anthologies to include Jimmy Santiago Baca's poems. Baca is also the author of a collection of stories and essays, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992); a play, Los tres hijos de Julia (1991); a screenplay, Bound by Honor , which was released by Hollywood Pictures as Blood In Blood Out in 1993; he also published at the end of 1993 Second Chances. Baca's most recent novel is A Glass of Water (2009). He published an original essay in 2013 called, "The Face," in ebook form with Restless Books, [12] along with digital editions of his Breaking Bread with the Darkness poetry volumes. [13] [14] [15]
https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/mmartin-rodriguez/index_files/vhBacaJimmy.htm
Santiago Baca wrote the screenplay for a Hollywood production, Blood In Blood Out . Baca also appeared as an actor in the film and as one of its producers. [16]
A film based on Baca's memoir A Place to Stand, directed by Daniel Glick, was released in 2014. [17] The film was produced by Gabriel Baca, David Gruban, and Andres Salazar [18] The creators of the movie also made a school curriculum to strengthen and highlight the morals within Baca's life story, containing a workbook and films.
In 2003, Baca appeared in an episode of Def Poetry Jam .
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Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. In 1945 she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note.
Gary Anthony Soto is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
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Blood In Blood Out is a 1993 American epic crime drama film directed by Taylor Hackford that has become a cult-classic film with a cult following among the Mexican-American community, over the decades. It follows the intertwining lives of three Chicano relatives from 1972 to 1984. They start out as members of a street gang in East Los Angeles, and as dramatic incidents occur, their lives and friendships are forever changed. Blood In Blood Out was filmed in 1991 throughout the Spanish-speaking areas of Los Angeles and inside California's San Quentin State Prison.
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Pablo Neruda (born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly left-wing political manifestos in which he advocated for violent opposition against the United States and other countries adherent to the ideas and principles of democratic capitalism, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
Mark Pawlak is a Polish-American poet and educator.
Jules Supervielle was a Franco-Uruguayan poet and writer born in Montevideo. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
Richard Shelton was an American writer, poet and emeritus Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
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Will Inman , was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and graduated from Duke University in 1943. He took his mother's maiden name, Inman, in part because his name became "Will In Man". He worked in a shipyard during World War II, and became an activist in 1947 after summers of work in the Blue Ridge Mountains where Inman attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize tobacco industry workers.
Vatos Locos is a Chicano slang term that means "crazy Dudes". It is also used as the name of multiple small gangs around the USA, Canada and Mexico. Many "Vatos Locos" use the colors red, black, green or brown.
Martín & Meditations on the South Valley is a semiautobiographical poetry collection or "novel in verse" written by Jimmy Santiago Baca and published in 1987. Contents of the book include an introduction by Denise Levertov,, Martín, an epic poem in nine parts, Meditations on the South Valley, a continuation of Martín in twenty-eight parts, and two glossaries of Spanish words, phrases, and references in English.
"I Am Offering This Poem" is a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca, first published in Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979). It was reprinted in 1990 in the collection Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems. Baca’s diction and imagery convey a central theme of the work- the importance of poetry and art in general.
Pinto or Pinta is a member of a Chicano subculture of people who are or have been incarcerated. It is an in-group moniker used to distinguish oneself from the general prison population or from "model inmates." It is a term which embraces the oppositional elements of being a Convicto. The term came from a bilingual play on the Spanish word for penitencia (penitence), since pintos and pintas are people who have spent time in penitentiaries. The term has also been traced to the Spanish word Pintao.
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