Poetic Voices Without Borders 2

Robert L. Giron is the grandson of the late Casimiro E. (ès Monge) Giron, musician, composer, and conductor of his orchestra, and the great grandson of a pioneer of San Angelo, Texas, who ran his own stagecoach service between El Paso (formerly El Paso del Norte), San Angelo, and San Antonio before railroads arrived in West Texas. His family roots go back four centuries in what is now the USA. In addition to having Comanche and Mexican/Spanish roots on the maternal side of his family, he has paternal lineage to the houses of Spain (Osuna / Sevilla) and France (Lorraine). Giron holds a B.A. degree from the University of Texas at El Paso where he studied linguistics and foreign languages; he later did post graduate work in creative writing with José Antonio Villarreal, Jon Manchip White, and the late Raymond Carver. He also holds a master's from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and later studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor under a Mellon Fellowship and has spent two summers at Selwyn College studying literature at the University of Cambridge International Summer Programme in Cambridge, England. Giron, a native of Nebraska, thinks of himself as a transplanted Texan who currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is the past coordinator of Honors Programs and teaches English, creative writing, and film and literature at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland. Trilingual, he writes in English, Spanish, and French.