Full Title: “New Deep Vellum poetry editor found community among Dallas writers. Now, he’s helping lead it (via Dallas Morning News)”
Anyone paying close attention to Dallas culture will remember 2014 as the year a literary scene began to emerge. It was the year the city’s first independent bookstore, The Wild Detectives, opened; the year Will Evans launched a translation publishing house, Deep Vellum; the year hometown novelist Merritt Tierce earned critical acclaim with her debut novel, Love Me Back and the year the Dallas Public Library revived its book festival.
It also happens to be the year that Sebastián Hasani Páramo, Deep Vellum’s new poetry editor, moved back to North Texas.
“I was really optimistic about Dallas and my ability to make connections and be part of this community,” Páramo, 32, says. “And looking back now, it’s been really incredible to be part of this story because in some ways when I moved back it felt like we were writing on a blank slate.”
Páramo grew up in Garland and earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Texas. With an MFA in poetry under his belt from Sarah Lawrence College in 2012, he spent a few years in New York City before seeking cheaper rent back home. That Dallas readers and writers were building a literary community was serendipitous. In Páramo’s earliest visions of his life as a writer, he imagined being part of a literary-minded social circle, like the salons in Paris or the Algonquin Round Table in 1920s New York.
Click here for more information.
Links:
