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Home / Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference / Schedule / Conference Schedule 2020 / Conference Schedule Saturday, February 22, 2020 / Locating the Magic within the Autobiographical with Joel Salcido

Conference Schedule 2020

Conference Schedule 2020

Saturday, February 22, 2020, 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Locating the Magic Within the Autobiographical with Joel Salcido

Date(s): Saturday, February 22, 2020, 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Location: Tooker, Old Main (view map)
Type(s): Discussion, Generative Workshop, Presentation, Workshop
Genre and Form(s): Autobiography, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Poetry
Tags: Magic

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Meet our Faculty

About the Session

In this generative session, we will pinpoint the places where magic resides in autobiographical poetry. Through personal exploration and group discussion, we will find places where truth and magic touch, will discover how magic renders truth truer, begets an attentiveness in the reader, and locates moments more deeply in the experiential. All this opens narrative poetics to new possibilities of phantasmagoria and wonder. We will briefly examine contemporary poems containing some of these elements. Attendees will be asked to bring in a short piece of their own narrative/biographical writing as well as its backstory. We will mine each story to enhance the magics contained in the writing in order to open them to new imaginings.

Meet the Presenter(s)

Photograph of Joel Salcido wearing a pigeon mask


Joel Salcido

Joel Salcido was born in the San Fernando Valley and raised in West Phoenix. He is the son of Mexican immigrants, a first-generation college graduate, a husband, and father of three sons. Salcido characterizes his work as hood magical realism—a navigation between the grief & ecstasy of place & experience. His poetry and prose are not simply written to or about his culture and community—but from it. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in [PANK] Magazine, Winter Tangerine, YesPoetry, PidgeonHoles, Write On: Downtown, Public Pool, and Acentos Review among others. He is the recipient of a Virginia G. Piper Creative Research Fellowship and a Winter Tangerine workshop alum. Salcido holds an MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University. 


Learn more about Joel Salcido