Livingston, Guatemala, 1986
He is a poet of Garifuna origin and a transdisciplinary writer and editor based in Guatemala City. He received in 2015 the Luis Cardoza y Aragón Mesoamerican Poetry Award. Also he was included in the list The Most Creative in the Region of Forbes Central America magazine (2020). In addition to poetry, he has collaborated in dance, visual arts, music, and artistic action.
Published texts: Los magos del crepúsculo [y blues otra vez] (Cultura, 2005), CafeínaMC: segunda parte, la fiesta y sus habitantes (Catafixia, 2010), CafeínaMC: primera parte, la anunciación de la fiesta (Folia, 2011), san juan – la esperanza (Literal, 2013), Miss muñecas vudu (Germinal, 2015), traslaciones (Cultura, 2015), ¡Hola Gravedad! (hochroth Verlag, 2016; german tr. by Timo Berger), No Budu Please (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018; eng. tr. by Urayoán Noel), and Qué haré con mi lugar en el cielo / What will I do with my place in the sky (Toronto Biennial of Art, 2019; eng. tr. by Urayoán Noel).
As a member of the literary collective La Retaguardia, he is currently working on several personal and collaborative creative projects.
A seminal Guatemalan poet and musician known for his fractured poetic aesthetics, González utilizes the musicality and rhythm of his compositions to bewitch his readers into following him on journeys to examine the immaterial, the spiritual, the periphery.
Juliana Clark
Columbia Journal
González & Urayoán draw us magnetically into the site of a brissage, a crack in our-now-shared tongue’s foundation, from which the Fecund propulses, from which the Fecund finds and inhabits us, our language.»
Trish Hartland
PRANK Magazine
One of the most prolific Garifuna writers today, González has built a window into contemporary Black indigeneity in Mesoamerica, but also closed that same window in a sidelong attack on colonialist language and syntax, rewriting Spanish as he goes.
Here, the actual linguistic transformation of Spanish and indigenous threads within the Garífuna community of today and between, González’s overa ll playfulness with history, myth and ode.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
About No Budu Please
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018
González, one of today’s most prolific Garifuna writers, has built a window into contemporary black indigeneity in Mesoamerica, but he has also closed that same window in a lateral attack on colonialist language and syntax, rewriting Spanish in his wake.
Aída Toledo
Centroamericana
Fragmented, broken syntax that plays with language and takes it to the song. Like a kind of prayer, his poems become frenetic, summoning requests. There is no comfort in his poetics. The reader looks at a writing forged in the musicalized word. Where experimentation is the constant: spelling is repeatedly undone, questioning the norm: who is the owner of the word and who should we follow if not our own word that springs from the most intimate part of ourselves?
Timo Berger
Signaturen