ISBN: 978-1-931010-52-8
88 pp. | paper | $11.00

poetry by William Archila

In The Art of Exile, William Archila asks readers to engage with a subject seldom explored in American poetry: the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s and its impact on Central American immigrants who now claim this country as home. In language that is poignant and often harrowing, the poet takes us on a journey from Santa Ana, El Salvador, to Los Angeles, California. Archila bridges race, class, metaphor, and reality with astuteness, mingling humor and pain with a skill that denigrates neither.

William Archila was born in Santa Ana and earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon, where he received the Fighting Fund Fellow Award. The award-winning poet's work has been published in Agni , Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe , Crab Orchard Review , and The Georgia Review and also appears in the anthologies New to North America: Writing by Immigrants (Burning Bush Publishing, 2007) and Another City: Writing from Los Angeles (City Lights, 2001).

"A poet of the heart and head, of the personal and public, at times William Archila's poignant poems make me hear and feel an echo of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo." --From the introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner