Voces de mi Locura: Poemas y Canciones/Voices From My Madness: Poems and Songs
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About the Book
This book was written when I was living in the middle of an emotional crisis. I started to write parts of some of the poems when I took a Spanish literature and a Latin America poetry class at Southwest Texas State University in 1986. The poets we studied were very hermetic and I wanted to write poems that people could read, understand, and think about. Voces de mi locura: poemas y canciones/ Voices From My Madness: Poems and Songs is a collection of poems that deal with my search to find God and overcome my supposed mental illness. The poems talk about my life, hope, dreams and fears, love, and nature. Some poems are dialogues and anti-poems in prose that show the loss of my identity in the world, family problems, and pessimism. Some of the Spanish poems have music and internal rhymes. In other poems, I play with words. Most poems have uneven metrics and are free verse poems. The poems in English are a translation from the Spanish ones and some acquired a different structure but still have music. This collection participated in the Literary contest "Letras de Oro" ("Letters of Gold") organized by the University of Miami under a Spanish version titled Voces de mi conciencia (Voices From My Conscience) in 1996, but did not win a prize. The manuscript was later revised and translated into English and re-titled, as it is known today. I wrote and translated this bilingual book with all my love, care, and respect for you, my readers. Thank you for buying my book and I hope to touch you in a positive way.
About the Author
Julio César Alvarez was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, on May 28, 1965. He is the second of four brothers. He studied his elementary and junior high school in this city. He had a talent to recite poems since he was very young. His parents and brothers are the most important persons in his life. Alvarez migrated to the United States in 1980. He dreamt becoming a doctor of medicine. He attended United High School in Laredo, Texas. There, he met Charles Dunham, his first English teacher, who helped him to connect words and phrases in English, and graduated with honors. He then studied two years at the Laredo Community College and obtained his Associate of Arts degree. There, he met Instructor Claudio Perez who influenced him greatly to pursue a career in science. Julio César Alvarez attended Southwest Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas in 1985. He worked as a Botany Research Assistant and as an assistant Spanish teacher in this school. He studied Spanish literature and Latin American poetry with Maria Isabel Tamargo, who inspired him to write. He started to write this book at about this time. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in general biology and Spanish in absentia in 1988. Wrongly diagnosed with Schizophrenia impeded Alvarez to continue with his dream of becoming a doctor. But he later registered in a program to get a degree in education at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, the city where he actually resides. He has worked lately in the field of Education.