Roberto Tejada Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Roberto Tejada is an award-winning poet, art historian, curator, author of art histories, and editor who specializes in Latino and Latin American art.

He attended New York University where he graduated with his BA in comparative literature. He also received a PhD in interdisciplinary media studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

He resided in Mexico City from 1987 to 1997, serving on the editorial board of Vuelta, a magazine. He also served as the executive editor of Artes de México. He founded the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, which he also co-edits. The multi-lingual journal featured poetry and translation and was printed from 1991 to 2014.

Roberto previously was a professor at places such as the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at San Diego, and Southern Methodist University. In 2014, he was made the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in 2014.

He is known for writing National Camera and has written catalog essays in Now Dig This! as well as Allora & Calzadilla. Tejada’s poetry has been featured in different full length volumes such as Why the Assembly Disbanded, Full Foreground, Exposition Park, and Mirrors for Gold. Some of his poems were included in Spanish translation Todo en el ahora, and his Latinx poetics of the Americas featured more poems with Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Poetry.

Tejada’s writing takes on the political imagination as well as the topic of the impurity of time in shared lineage environment and configurations of art and more that are inclined to the future. Readers can find out more about his work by reading on and getting summaries of two of his most elegant and important works. If you’re someone who really appreciates poetry, these might be the right books for you.

Why the Assembly Disbanded is a 2022 poetry book by Roberto Tejada. This is a completely unique work that pushes the boundaries of Latinx culture and calls into question what makes up a borderlands poetics.

Throughout the course of his work and career as a critic and poet, Tejada has constantly looked into themes of Latinx culture as well as language, history, politics, and ecologies. In this collection, Roberto continues this legacy and also offers up to the readers a contribution to Latinx letters that also manages to reflect on the relations held between America and Latin America, in particular their borderlands both real and symbolic.

This collection is equal parts philosophical, postmodern, and immersive. It gives an associative and critical Latinx aesthetic that connects the borderlands of Mexico and the United States to Latin America and its unique neo-baroque heritage. All types of people from all walks of life are featured inside these pages, from exiles to tourists to settlers and migrants, all making their way through different hemispheric landscapes and making their appearances in these poems.

The author and poet is able to successfully relate the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that combined with the plights of immigrants are able to transform home into a place not of safety but of impending eviction, even as ideal weather is able to make some room for what is possible in their own histories.

These pages include futuristic vistas that are open to the narratives of colonial extraction, abuses of capitalism, human displacement, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical imagines in the sense-filled worlds that make up urban and digital life, and the relations of desire in an economy of attention that is encouraged by pictures and words. These poems also feature settings and places such as L.A. and Mexico City where words give voice to community and bring specific places and themes to life.

Particularly if you are a fan of poetry and always looking to expand your horizons, this collection will likely be very rewarding. Language is used by this poet to build worlds and Tejada uses imagination as well as reality in equal parts to impart ideas and feelings all his own like no other poet can. Check out Why the Assembly Disbanded and open your world through the vivid words of Roberto Tejada.

Carbonate of Copper is a 2025 poetry book by Roberto Tejada. This book was longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. This book not only features the lyrical poetry of this author but it is also accentuated with high quality documentary photographs to showcase a life lived by the borderland of the U.S. and Mexico.

This book was penned during periods of time that the author spent in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas. Through these poems, Tejada is able to lend a voice to the unsettled stories of the past and to the present day experiences such as custody and displacement that are experienced by people every day.

The poems set the scene to show a picture of life adjacent to the border and shines a light upon the brutal realities that migration involves. It is a witness to the hazards of the past and the present taken on by individuals, risking often everything that they have in search of a better life and asylum while often going through a wide range of sorrow and pain while attempting to do so.

Through their words, these poems are able to show the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also an aspiration to justice and mercy. It also shows the self-organized order of time for migrants who are looking to live with dignity while also waiting their turn to make it to the dividing line’s other side and all that it has to offer.

The title of the book is a reference to a mineral that can be found in azurite and malachite. This is a color medium that was relevant in art during globalization’s first phase, the colonial enterprise that came after, and its systems of extraction. Ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli was more prized than carbonate of copper, but it was still coveted during the Renaissance and this even lead to a market for the blue derivative utilized in tempera and oil pigment.

Focusing on a variety of important topics, Tejada has produced a work that is forceful in its purpose while also remaining readable and inspiring. Check out Carbonate of Copper to experience Roberto’s poetry for yourself!