Lawrence Welsh

Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, ""mere self-expression."" Berman's visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border-detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared-are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.

Pachuco Skull with Sombrero: Los Angeles, 1970 is a collection of 40 poems by Lawrence Welsh. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Lawrence Welsh lives in El Paso, Texas. A first generation Irish American and award-winning journalist, Welsh has published nine books of poetry, including Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009 (University of New Mexico Press). Now in a second printing, this collection won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. It was also named a Notable Book by Southwest Books of the Year and a finalist for both the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award. In 2011, Irish America magazine in New York City named him one of the "Top 100 Irish Americans" of the year. In 1987, he received The Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi Outstanding Graduating Journalist Award from California State University, Long Beach. In 1979, he co-founded The Alcoholics, the L.A. punk rock band. As part of its Punk Archive Series, Sahlugg records of Los Angeles in 2017 released East of Sepulveda: 1979-1982, a retrospective of the band's studio and live cuts. A winner of the Bardsong Press Celtic Voice Writing Award in Poetry and the 2017 Pen World magazine Montegrappa essay competition, Welsh is an English professor at El Paso Community College. His poetry, fiction, reviews, essays, as well as journalistic writings, have appeared in more than 200 national and regional magazines, journals, newspapers and anthologies, including Puerto del Sol, Hawaii Review, The Louisiana Review, Rio Grande Review, The Texas Observer, The Santa Fe New Mexican, The Irish Echo, Irish America, New Madrid Review, The Wormwood Review, Onthebus, Pearl, Poetry Now, Big Bridge, The Caf Review, Nexus, Chiron Review, Poetry Motel, Main Street Rag, The Raven Chronicles, Unlikely Stories, The Powhatan Review, Pitchfork and The Los Angeles Daily Breeze, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper where he spent five years as a reporter and staff writer in the 1980s.