Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!
Poet of the Day: Eduardo C. Corral
Eduardo C. Corral is a poet and the son of Mexican immigrants. His first book,  Slow Lightning , was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Corral has also been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the “Discovery”/ The Nation  Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from  Poetry Magazine , and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. His forthcoming book, Guillotine, will be published by Graywolf Press in August 2020. He is currently an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University. 
This poet belongs in our classrooms because…
Corral writes with candor and vulnerability about the challenges, blessings, and varieties of American identities and never shies away from powerful emotions or difficult subjects, such as immigration or sexuality. In his debut Slow Lightning and in his 2020 collection Guillotine , Corral pours his whole life into his work—poems about parents, about love, about belonging, about isolation, about sexuality, about self-doubt, about self-discovery. For readers unfamiliar with living poets or Mexican American poets, Corral provides an unforgettable and utterly teachable gateway into the vibrant and brave world of contemporary American poetry.
A Poem by Eduardo C. Corral
Read &/or listen to "Border Patrol Agent"
Other Poems and Books by Eduardo Corral
Read &/or listen to “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes” 
Click here to purchase Corral’s debut poetry collection Slow Lightning
Click here to preorder Corral’s forthcoming poetry collection Guillotine
Classroom Connections
Here is a link to a full lesson on Corral’s poem "Border Patrol Agent." 
Here is a link to Poetry Foundation ’s free resources on Eduardo Corral.
Here is a link to a 2012 interview with Corral as part of the Library of Congress Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. 

My name is Joel Garza . I’m the Upper School chair of English at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. Outside of school, I am on the board of Dallas’s Deep Vellum Publishing, and I cohost #THEBOOKCHAT, a Twitter chat devoted to providing resources for teachers of emerging &/or underread writers—writers like Eduardo Corral.