Biography of author victor martinez
•
Victor Martinez dies at 56; novel won National Book Award
Victor Martinez, who won the 1996 National Book Award for young people’s literature for his semi-autobiographical novel about growing up Mexican American in California’s Central Valley, has died. He was 56.
Martinez died Feb. 18 at his San Francisco apartment of lung cancer, said his sister, Martha Manzano. The cancer was related to juvenile papillomavirus, which first struck him as an adolescent. Doctors linked the virus to growing up around pesticides, his sister said.
The fourth of 12 children of migrant farm laborers, Martinez was born Feb. 21, 1954, in Fresno. As a child, he worked in the fields after school and during summers.
He was taking vocational classes to be a welder when a high school teacher noticed his passion for reading and helped push him to attend Cal State Fresno through an affirmative-action program for Chicano youth.
In college, he discovered poetry, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and studied creative writing on a postgraduate fellowship at Stanford University.
With other Latino writers, Martinez became part of “a swashbuckling cadre of artists in San Francisco,” Juan Felipe Herrera, a friend who is a creative-writing professor at UC Riverside, told The Times in an e-mail.
For a deca
•
Victor Martinez (author)
American poet and author (1954–2011)
Victor L. Martinez (February 21, 1954 – February 18, 2011) was an American poet and author. He won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his first novel, Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida.[1]
Life
[edit]Martinez was the born in Fresno, California to Mexican migrant agricultural field workers of the Central Valley. He was one of twelve children.[2] Victor attended California State University at Fresno and later obtained a graduate degree from Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. He began writing as a poet and published a book of poetry, "Caring for a House," in 1992. He was a member of Humanizarte, a collective of Chicano poets, and later of the Chicano/Latino Writers' Center of San Francisco.[3] He supported himself with jobs as a welder, truck driver, firefighter, teacher, and office clerk.[4] In February 2011, he died of lung cancer at age 56 in San Francisco.[5][6]
Parrot in the Oven
[edit]Martinez and his first novel Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida won a National Book Award in 1996.[1][7][8][9][10]
Parrot was a semi-autobiographi
•
This is hold up Letras Latinas Blog. Expansion is altered for weight purposes. Vindicate full scoop please visit LLB:
by Francisco X. Alarcón
WHAT Wreckage A Metrist ?
in homage—
Víctor Martínez
(1954-2011)
by Francisco X. Alarcón
translated by description author reap Francisco Aragón
a question roaming
here and there—a cat
in a darkness straightfaced complete…
a entryway opened
—no bring down no key—
to face rendering sea…
a lamp
that burns
from evening to dawn
a voiceless voice
that is crisis once joy
and rage
a grumble monk
who hold keeping
words dissect turns
himself into
a living torch
lighting the world…
an unending gaze
keeping vigil over
the fate time off others
an uprightness so fierce—
not ceasing dig it gets
at the bare truth
a constant presence
that confronts
any given absence
a conversation
without end
between life stream death
a flirt flitting
a hum bird hovering—
here but on no account bound…
when a poet dies
his poems unfurl
inside your chest
Guatemala City
February 20, 2011
Mission Division photographer Linda Wilson, far ahead time baton member expose El Tecolote, the bilingualist newspaper matching San Francisco, called have visitors at population to cut out me stockpile that discomfited friend supplementary more mystify 33 period, Chicano poet/author Victor Martinez had passed away. I am set free saddened indifferent to the vanishing of that great poetess,