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ire'ne lara silva
ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers, which won Gold for the 2025 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book (ILBA), a comic book, VENDAVAL, and two short story collections, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán, and the light of your body. ire’ne is the recipient of the ILBA 2025 Rising Stars Poetry Award, a 2025 Storyknife Writers Residency, the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction, a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award.
Resume (PDF)
Work Samples (PDF)
MORE ABOUT THIS ARTIST
Artist Type: Literary Arts: Author/Writer, Poet; Teaching Artist/Instructor
Artist Statement of Work
Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):
I write poetic prose and prose-like poetry because I want to see what language can do inbetween the two. My writing and revising process is built around adding successive layers that work to complicate and deepen the narrative. In all my work, whether concerned with grief, illness, women, Mexicans/Indigenous peoples, history, violence, or mythology, my strongest desire has been to write people and their lives in their wholeness—to represent not just their physical lives but also their emotional, psychological, and spiritual lives. To write our people with a deep knowledge and understanding of the history that has shaped them. I have been greatly influenced by Toni Morrison’s philosophy—that we must reject the paradigm that demands that we write for “the white gaze.” I believe fiercely that there is power and freedom and beauty in writing for ourselves as people of color, as Latine/Indigenous peoples.