Alberto Blanco (poet)

For two years, he pursued a master's degree in Asian Studies, specializing in China, at El Colegio de México.1 Blanco was first published in a journal in 1970.

His work has been translated into twenty languages, including English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Zapotec, and Russian.2 In 1997 he accepted a residency in Bellagio, Italy, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; and in 2000 he was invited as a resident poet at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona.

Blanco has been involved in many of the most important poetry festivals in the world and has given many courses, workshops, readings, and lectures in more than fifty universities in the United States as well as in France, Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Colombia, Ireland, El Salvador, Chile, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, and Finland.

To date, he has published more than seventy books, along with twenty more of translations, anthologies, or illustrations as well as more than eight hundred publications in magazines, catalogs, newspapers, and literary supplements.

In 2011, the Bitter Oleander Press published a bilingual edition of his book, Tras el Rayo, entitled Afterglow translated by Jennifer Rathbun.

A new edition (800 pages), revised and augmented of his essays on visual arts, was published in 2012, entitled El eco de las formas (The Echo of Forms).

In fact, Alberto Blanco is well known as a visual artist; his collages have appeared in many books and journals, and his paintings have hung in national galleries.

Furthermore, Blanco has been a songwriter, and he was the singer and keyboardist in the rock and jazz groups "La Comuna" ("The Commune") and "Las Plumas Atómicas" ("The Atomic Plumes").

His poetry dedicated to rock is collected in the book Paisajes en el oido (Earscapes), published by Aldus in 2012 ).

At the end of 1996, he returned with his family to Mexico City, but in 1998 and 1999, he was invited as a distinguished professor to San Diego State University in California.

Regarding Dawn of the Senses, Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, in his introduction to the book, writes, "[Blanco] is someone in whom, as Henry James said, nothing is lost.

His knowledge of chemistry, his work as a visual artist and jazz musician, his grounding in Chinese literature and Zen Buddhism--all of these combine to give his poems a tone and perspective unlike any other Mexican poet."