Stony the Road - Paperback

by Harold J. Recinos (Author)

Recinos' love for poetry dates back to being abandoned by Latino parents at age twelve to live on New York City streets. When he turned sixteen, he was taken into the family of a white Presbyterian minister and guided back to school. After finishing high school, Recinos attended undergraduate school in Ohio and graduate school in New York, where he befriended the Nuyorican poets Miguel Piñero and Pedro Pietri, who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Stony the Road engages life outside of mainstream American society and picks its way through places of despair and marginality to the revelations of belonging that protest indifference and inequality. The collection raises questions and proposes responses to the crisis of understanding in economic and political life, as well as the cultural narrative that America welcomes strangers. The poems tap into the changing mood of American life and the obscured world of rejected human beings and communities by exploring lives worth telling.

Author Biography

Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among his recent publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church; Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation; Crossing Bridges; Breathing Space; and After Eden. He earned a doctor of philosophy with honors in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. Since the mid-1980s, Recinos has worked with the Salvadoran refugee community and with marginal communities in El Salvador on issues of human rights.