Reading by Kilwein Guevara kicks off National Poetry Month at UW-Green Bay

GREEN BAY — The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay celebrates National Poetry Month with a reading by Maurice Kilwein Guevara at 7 p.m. Thursday (April 2) in Phoenix Room B of the University Union, 2420 Nicolet Drive.

The event is free and open to the public.

Guevara, a native of Colombia who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., is a professor of English at UW-Milwaukee, where he teaches in the master’s and Ph.D. programs in creative writing as well as in the Latino Studies program. He is the author of four poetry collections and has been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies.

His first book of poetry, titled Postmortem (University of Georgia Press, 1994), won the National Contemporary Poetry Series Competition.

His second volume, Poems of the River Spirit, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1996. Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose came out in 2001 by New Issues Press. POEMA, his fourth collection, was released in 2009 by the University of Arizona Press.

A dynamic presenter of his own work, Kilwein Guevara has given poetry performances and workshops in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Spain, Cuba and throughout the United States. His work has appeared in many poetry magazines and journals, and has been included in several anthology collections.

He has served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and was the first Latino to be elected as its president. He is married to the poet Janet Jennerjohn. They have two sons and live in Milwaukee.

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