Francisco X. Alarcón

"Imagine, you know, if I did not have access to the memories of my grandma or to my grandfather. If I could not talk to my uncles in Spanish, I would be very poor as a person."

"For me, a poem is not about ideas. It's never an idea that I have. It's basically an image or a sense, mostly images, that have to do with the senses, and so the five senses, and then from the image, …"

"I will be reading the poetry and I will read it aloud because I will be, you know, whispering the poetry, because poetry, I really believe, has to do with a sense of communicating and the idea of read…"

"I believe that I became a poet, a writer, when I was transcribing my grandma's songs in Mexico. I was about 15 years old. And my grandma used to sing with the mandolin a beautiful song that she used t…"