A Statement on My Work
(Note: I had to write a statement about my work for a civic artist profile. I’m not fond of statements of that nature, but it says a lot about who I am and where I’m at today.)
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I write in each literary genre, although I am presently focused on creative prose—fiction and creative nonfiction.
I am currently working on edits for a memoir titled “Son of a Natural Man” that will appear in the fall 2025 issue of Evergreen Review. I am also in the process of completing a book of selected personal essays and a collection of short stories for publication. Most of the works in the two volumes have already appeared in magazines and journals. Each work will be revised to make them better fit in book publications.
There are two themes that are important to work. One is the concept of an inbetween man, which helps to characterize my adult life after the completion of a Ph. D. resulted in me working as a racial token as a professor in a series of predominately white colleges and universities. Although I could never fit into the cultural realities lived by most of my colleagues, living in their world resulted in a chasm that developed between me and the cultural world of my youth—a community on Chicago’s West Side that as a young poet I wrote about as a place called Bluesville.
After living and working for a quarter century with a divided psyche, I retired early from a professorship that I had to overcome numerous challenges to earn and moved to San Antonio in the hope of finding it a place of refuge. A place I might think of as home. I wanted to live in a more diverse world and felt that San Antonio as a largely brown city—a city in which a minority represented the majority population—might be a place where I might fit nicely.
Fitting in, however, has not always been easy.
It was the political commentator Anna Navarro who helped define my early San Antonio experiences for me. After Tyreeke Hill, the wide receiver for the Miami, was pulled over by gun-pointing Miami police officers on his way to a game in 2024, an incident several individuals captured on camera, Navarro commented on it during a national television appearance. While looking at the incident in which all of the officers were Latino and how their treatment of the NFL star recalled police-related incidents that resulted in the deaths of African Americans such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others, Navarro said not enough attention is paid to plight of people like the Dolphin’s receiver who are, in essence “minorities in a minority city.” After all, Miami is also a predominantly brown city. Navarro’s statement not only expressed how I felt as a Black man in San Antonio, but it also represented the thematic essence of the San Antonio stories I am now in the process of writing. After all, I live in a largely Spanish speaking Mexican American neighborhood on the city’s near South Side as an outsider because I have so little in common with the people who live in San Antonio’s longstanding East Side African American community.