Joaquín Zihuatanejo loves to tell the story of how and where he was born.
“The story my uncle likes to tell is that, flying down Gaston Avenue, things were happening in the back seat of his 1966 Cadillac Coupe DeVille. As he likes to say to me, ‘You were actually born on the mean streets of Old East Dallas.’ "
In other words, in his uncle’s prized vehicle, Joaquín was “starting to crown.”
His mom and uncle finally made it to Baylor University Medical Center, where no one had any idea that the newborn Joaquín would, 51 years later, become the first poet laureate of the city of Dallas, which will honor him in a special ceremony today.
For two years, Zihuatanejo will represent the city as “an ambassador of the literary arts” by presenting his original poems at schools and community events. Mayor Eric Johnson formally presented the award at today’s 8:30 a.m. event at Dallas City Hall and designated April as Poetry Month.
Zihuatanejo’s honor carries with it a $20,000 stipend, with $10,000 being awarded to Zihuatanejo in each of the first two years.
The mayor will also honor Madison Rojas, a student at Greenhill School, who for one year will hold the title of Youth Poet Laureate.
“My mother was raised in Trumbull, Texas, and moved to Dallas as a very young person,” Zihuatanejo said Tuesday. “Her father, my grandfather, was a cotton picker, working cotton fields in that part of Texas and also traveling to Oklahoma as well.”
He came to Dallas “for opportunity for his kids, my mother and her seven brothers and sisters. My mother had me when she was very young. She was a teen mother. She did the very best she could,” which half a century later fills him with empathy.
“I know what it means to be young and lost and beautiful. Many years ago, I was that once. My grandfather had a very big hand in raising me. My father left my mother the year of my birth.” Hence the reason his mom’s oldest brother was driving them to the hospital.
The beauty of his upbringing, he says, is that he was “surrounded by great storytellers,” who began filling him with stories the moment he was born.
And now, half a century later, Zihuatanejo is the author of six collections of poetry, including the most recent, Arsonist, which won the 2017 Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Huizache and Sonora Review and other literary journals.
In 2009, he became the No. 1-ranked slam poet in the world after winning both the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship and the World Cup of Poetry Slam Championship.
In 2012, he founded Dallas Youth Poets, which “seeks to serve student poets in Dallas and take a team of youth poets to the International Brave New Voices Poetry Slam Competition.”
He graduated from the University of North Texas and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M.
The Dallas Public Library, the Office of Arts and Culture and Deep Vellum Books launched the new poet laureate program in June 2021 to “recognize exemplary poetry and the poet’s role in sharing poetry with the greater community.”
Jo Giudice, director of libraries for the City of Dallas, says the city was motivated to designate a poet laureate “when we saw Amanda Gorman’s amazing performance at the presidential inauguration in 2021. We were inspired by the potential for Dallas Public Library to support a local poet the way Amanda Gorman was supported and encouraged in her career by the Los Angeles Public Library. The poet laureate program expands on what we already do to support youth poets and local artists, plus gives us an artist-in-residence who will help make poetry more accessible to all Dallas residents.”
For Zihuatanejo, his roots as a poet began at his childhood home in Old East Dallas, where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and where he grew up diving into the book collection that filled the family home.
“I tell people all the time that, the only thing holding that shelf up was the weight of the word upon it.” Just one of the books that provoked his curiosity was The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
“My grandfather would make me read at night to him, after a very long day of work.”
And what he most liked were the poems in the Norton Anthology.
“I would read to him in English, and he would critique my reading abilities in Spanish. So, I tried very hard to read as well as I could. And to see his face contort, when I would read a poem to him, or smile, when I would read a beautiful poem, or cry when I would read a tragic poem, I remember thinking as a very, very small child: ‘This is what I want to do. I want to make people’s faces change with words. I want to be a poet.’ "
He vows to visit the “25 to 30 satellite libraries” throughout the city of Dallas to “offer a reading or a workshop in an attempt to bring poetry to all communities.”
He hopes to inspire students in the Dallas Independent School District “to believe in their dreams and help me right the wrongs of the world with verse — but also to right/write them down.”
More than anything, he says, he wants “to bring poetry to the people. I don’t think poetry should belong to editors and professors — it should belong to people.”
Dallas already has “an extraordinary poetry scene inside it,” he says, “from the Oak Cliff poets to the Pleasant Grove poets to the slam poets to the Deep Ellum poets. I want to do what I can to highlight those voices. There are some amazing emerging poets in our city.”
Zihuatanejo lives with his wife, Aida, who grew up in Pleasant Grove, and their two daughters, Aiyana and Dakota, in Denton, not far from his alma mater.
