Evonne Acevedo was born and raised in Kankakee, Illinois. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago, and currently works as a writer and educator for a non-profit organization. She also facilitates a creative writing group for high school students in an Upward Bound program, and conducts workshops in poetry for health care students and professionals.
She has produced three collections of poetry. Deliberate Livid as a Guilt Trip, Clutchmate, and Terrible Eggs were completed respectively and appeared as chapbooks in early 2001, 2002, and 2004. She expects the publication her newest collection of poetry, Rubber Genius, in early 2006.
Her work has appeared in publications including New American Writing and Columbia Poetry Review, and in the RHINO Readers = Writers contest forum. Her poetry was recently featured on Ragged Edge Magazine online, a source for news, discussion, art and reviews about the disability experience.
Acevedo’s poetry has been described as “biomechanical”—a merge of the techni-calities of syntax with visceral sensuality. In her work, she says that she strives to attain the immediacy of experience rather than describe an event: “An actual experience, as it occurs, involves many senses, associations and distractions and is in reality not a grocery list of ‘this happened to me’ but a murk of second impressions and odor rattling back through the eyes and a network of deciduous backyards and terrible birthdays. The impressions, eyes and birthdays must be present to divert the reader from conjuring his own “stock” memory of a similar experience . . . to incorporate the insecurities, the discomfort, the interruptions, the skewed impressions, the smell, the texture, the noise and the distraction is to illustrate rather than narrate. “What is happening” is that mélange of perception that comes when “it” is really happening, and I attempt to be as true to that as the device of poetry will allow.”
BOOKS OF POETRY:
Deliberate Livid as a Guilt Trip (Chicago: hatch xanadu, 2001); Clutchmate (Chicago: hatch xanadu, 2002); Terrible Eggs (Chicago: hatch xanadu, 2004).
