Roberto Tejada was born in Los Angeles, California (1964). He has published critical reviews and writings on contemporary Latin American artists and photographers in Boletín de Curare, La jornada, Artes de México, Luna córnea (Mexico), Third Text (UK), Flash Art (US-Italy), Arte Internacional, and Art Nexus (Colombia). After ten years in Mexico City, editing Mandorla: New Writing From the Americas, an annual of advanced poetry and poetics, Tejada lives now in Austin where he's the assistant curator at the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. His poetry slows down the "reckless velocity of the social" with the figures and tropes of international (post) modernism. This writing pingpongs from a short, fragmentary, careful line a la Beckett to vast postapocalyptic caverns of fantasy and Bataillean distress. His enemy? The implacable, trivial "exoticism" demanded by the market, hell on serious art production.

September 18, 1998