Luis A. López is an American poet from San Jose, California. He has won numerous writing awards for his poetry and short stories.
His book, Warrior-Poet of the Fifth Sun (ISBN 1-933037-52-0) is currently available.
Reviews of "Warrior-Poet of the Fifth Sun":
"As a Chicano by culture, I have a tendency to look around me in the literary world hoping a young latino/a jaguar appears, their mind scathingly cool and hot cutting through the luke-warm room temperature poets of our times. Bored by the paltry mediocrity of much poetry from wedding cake Poet Laureate props to ghetto smack-down hip-hop sessions, imagine how pleased I was when I read Luis Lopez's poetry. It is real, crafted, exploratory and useful in the literary sense, it combines to create unique voice, its images are vital to the context of our age and it has a strenuous if not desperate sense of trying to make sense of the chaos, the violence, the racism, the lies.... I look forward to seeing the progressive development of this wonderful poet..."
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the National Poetry Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place To Stand, the prestigious International Prize.
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"The voice of Warrior-Poet of the Fifth Sun is a compelling and desperately needed one. The words - intrinsically beautiful in their own right - speak to important political and social issues. López moves smoothly from the Chicano to the Brown to the Latino to the Human experience. He is able to explore these identities in great depth with simple carefully crafted phrases. The pages of this book advance through different styles, as stream of consciousness meets hip-hop meets the e-technology of our time. The emotional range - from exuberance to melancholy - make the reading an exhilarating experience. Anger turns to joy which turns to sadness as the reader turns the pages. The work is inspirational. Through his poems, López tells his distinctive story - yet the words resonate from so many perspectives that the poems invite readers to interpret their own individual experiences through them. This multivocality makes the book a must-read for anyone interested in exploring identity. Powerful!"
James Vreeland, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
Yale University
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"When most poets write of their worlds we gain insight into their lives, but in the end we are left fully aware that in some sense we are voyeurs who will always stand outside the door watching them through the window of their existences. However, Luis A. López opens the door and invites us into the living room of his soul, where the words are chiseled with the blood and the tears of three cultures, torn loose and laid before us in a rendering that one marvels at how lines so clean and simple in the end are interweaved in such complexity that for the instant we read them we truly become a part of the world as seen through his eyes. His poems meet the highest criteria of poetry: they are honest, as natural as breath, and offer insights so obvious that the reader wonders why he never thought of life quite in those terms on his own. These are true poems that speak to the mind, the body, and the soul, as all good poetry should."
Roger Humes, Director
The Other Voices International Project