The Real Horse
Page 6
Thank you to my colleagues and students in the Department of English and in the MFA program at the University of Arizona for their example and encouragement.
This work developed in conversations, some in passing and some intense, with Sam Ace, Rosa Alcalá, Brian Blanchfield, Susan Briante, C. A. Conrad, Hector Corante, Pamela Corante, Tonya Foster, C. S. Giscombe, Kate Greenstreet, Max Greenstreet, Kimiko Hahn, Duriel E. Harris, Jen Hofer, Harmony Holiday, Janet Holmes, Fady Joudah, Bhanu Kapil, Marcia Klotz, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Paul Laska, Evan Lavender-Smith, Rachel Levitsky, Chris Martin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Leerom Medovoi, Christopher Patrick Miller, Fred Moten, Chris Nealon, Hoa Nguyen, Phil Pardi, Miguel Angel Ramirez, Seph Rodney, Jeff Sirkin, Brandon Shimoda, Allison Smith, Carmen Giménez Smith, Dale Smith, Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman, Juliana Spahr, Ola Stahl, T. C. Tolbert, Divya Victor, Lisa Wells, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
I am grateful to the organizers of the conferences Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing (University of Montana), Crosstalk, Color and Composition (University of California, Berkeley), and Radius of Arab-American Writers, and I am grateful as well to the curators of the reading series Edge, Intermezzo, and Fair Weather in Tucson, Arizona, Emory Poetry Council at Emory University, Fort Gondo in St. Louis, Missouri, the MFA programs at Boise State University and Mills College, Diesel Books in Oakland, and the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University, where some of these conversations occurred and where I presented this work in progress.
Thank you again to Lindon W. Barrett (1961–2008), who held a space where I could unperform. I should only say he’s gone and we are fewer, if we let ourselves be.
Most of all, all gratitude in being with Susan Briante and a daughter who wasn’t sent across our lines to be ours.
About the Author
Born in Lima, Peru, to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, Farid Matuk has lived in the United States since the age of six as an undocumented person, a “legal” resident, and a patriated citizen. He is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions) and of the chapbooks My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta) and from Don’t Call It Reginald Denny (Society Editions).