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Recinos fell in love with poetry growing up on the streets, after being abandoned by immigrant Latino parents. Finding shelter in public libraries, Recinos discovered that poetry was a way to make sense of living on the streets in the pitiable condition of teen homelessness and heroin addiction. After being unofficially adopted at the age of sixteen into a white American family from Ohio that moved to New York, he began a drug-free life, went to college, and eventually earned a PhD in cultural anthropology with honors from The American University in Washington, DC. Breathing Space is a poetry collection that raises to the level of consciousness the beauty and obstinate spirit of workers, mothers, grandmothers, brothers, sisters, revolutionaries, undocumented immigrants, and those considered unworthy of love. Recinos' poetry celebrates and chastises the inner workings of the American Dream and moves readers to develop a compassionate awareness for the hopes, struggles, and suffering of the most vulnerable members of society. Recinos' poetry not only expresses outrage and despair in the face of unjust suffering in the world, but the poems uniquely invite readers to see the beauty of people at the edges of society.
About the author
Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. A cultural anthropologist, he specializes in work and ethnographic literature dealing with undocumented Central American migrants and the Salvadoran diaspora. He has published numerous articles, chapters in collections, and written major works in Latino Theology, including 18 collections of poetry. Recently, two new collections of poetry were released, The Looking Glass: Far and Near and The Place across the River (under review for a Pulitzer Prize). Recinos's poetry has been featured in Anglican Theological Review, Weavings, Sojourners, Anabaptist Witness, The Arts, Perspective, Afro-Hispanic Review, Hispanic Theological Initiative, En Foco, among others. Since the early 1980s, Recinos has worked with and defended the civil and human rights of Salvadoran refugees in the States and in marginal communities in El Salvador.
