Chris Santiago’s debut collection Tula was selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Copper Nickel, Conduit, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and American Public Media’s The Slowdown. His collaboration with composer Lembit Beecher and ethnographer Todd Lawrence, Say Home, was commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and received its world premiere in 2019. A Loft Poetry Mentor and Fellow of the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he received his PhD from the University of Southern California and recently joined the Faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Santa Clarita, CA. He lives in Pasadena.
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Books by Chris Santiago
From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.
Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, “a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.” In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.
Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise.
