ROBERTO TEJADA IS a poet and interdisciplinary scholar of art history, critical theory, and literary studies. His poetry includes Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), and Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010). Originally from Los Angeles, Tejada lived in Mexico City from 1987 to 1997 and was an editor of Vuelta, the influential literary magazine published by Octavio Paz.
In our conversation, I chose not to focus exclusively on Tejada’s new book of poetry, Why the Assembly Disbanded, but to incorporate a discussion of it because it’s so integral to his overall trajectory. While we do discuss the poems in this new book, I structured the interview as an introduction to his work in various fields.
As a poet and thinker, Tejada moves with facility from the Conquest to midcentury North American poetics and current debates about Latinx aesthetics. As…
