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POETRY
IS LIFE
Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning American poet and writer of Chicano descent.
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While serving a five-year sentence in a maximum security prison, he learned to read and began to turn his life around, eventually emerging as a prolific artist of the spoken and written word.
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He is a winner of the prestigious International Award for his memoir, “A Place to Stand,” the story of which is now also a documentary by the same title.
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Jimmy Santiago Baca, photographed by Lonnie J. Anderson
2025 WRITERS RETREAT
JUNE 27-29
"In June of 2023, fresh and unleashed from America’s covid crisis, a room full of excited poets gathered for the Annual Jimmy Santiago Baca Writer’s Retreat, held at the Albuquerque Museum. Besides the expected daily workshops, we were surprised to receive sessions on ecstatic dancing, hip-hop verses, gardening, native ceremonial movements, and an opportunity to learn a Buddhist chant. In his words, we were invited to ‘loosen up the subconscious enough to allow the ego to step aside for the writer/poet to write’. And loosen up we did."
- Veronica C. Evans
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