Mateo Acuña
writer, poet, librettist, artist
2023-24 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate
2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate
Dear Spanish
I did my own cover art with prismacolor pencils. Conceptually I wanted to portray the final image from the title poem, “Dear Spanish.”
chapbook coming out in June!
backcover
The poems in the chapbook (a booklet of poetry, smaller than a collection) together form an autobiographical narrative about the journey to find a sense of belonging and identity at the intersections of race, culture, gender, and personal and collective history. Weaving in and out of chronological time, the poems are threads of many colors, various versions of the self at different points of the self-actualization process, creating meaning-making and identity like a patchwork quilt.
To be biracial is to belong to both and neither ethnic or racial group; to be transgender is to know both and neither end of the binary spectrum. The multiplicities these identities hold, and complexities in tandem with one another, can create intense feelings of alienation and isolation even as they gift the identity-holder with knowledge and experiences locked off to others, a kind of skeleton key to diversity in the human experience, a perspective often ignored simply because it is by nature complex and not easily digestible. I have found poetry to be a powerful and fitting outlet.
I hope you enjoy the book and its poetic possibilities as much as I did.
- Mateo
Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun
a twenty-minute opera written by Mateo Acuña and composed by Mina Pariseau.
Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun is a retelling of the Andean “Legend of the Ayar Brothers”, which was told to me by my father as a bedtime story growing up about how the city of Cusco was founded. Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun takes place decades later, between life and death, night and day, paranoia and epiphany. Manqu (Mon-co) Capac, the founder of Cusco and the hero of the original legend, is now in old age and being pursued by the demon Supay, the terrifying jaguar god of death, until a visitor from his past appears and confronts him. Forced to grapple with what he’s done for power and the lies he’s told, which, in this version create the original “Legend of the Ayar Brothers,” Manqu must learn to finally surrender to what—and who—will be waiting for him in the afterlife.