Eduardo C Corral (Zell Visiting Writers Series)

Eduardo C. Corral’s latest book of poetry, Guillotine (Graywolf, 2020), gives voice and depth to undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers through dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and deeply human, relentless interiority. Corral is also the author of Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He’s the first Latinx poet to win this competition. Corral is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Hodder Fellowship and the National Holmes Poetry Prize, both from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. Praised for his seamless blending of English and Spanish, tender treatment of history, and careful exploration of sexuality, Corral’s poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience. Guillotine, his second book, traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?

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