Wyoming Arts Council

“There is no other voice that conjures the sky and keeps count of stars as human migrations, moving, fading, and bursting anew as Aaron Abeyta’s. Here he is standing naked and alone on the abandoned snow drifts and tierras, holding them as fallen angels and stellar evidence of our birthright — the luminous lands we claimed we would honor thirty-five years ago. Abeyta speaks with the voices of Nazim Hikmet, Jim Sagel, Allison Hedge-Coke and Albert Hunter, all lovers of the small earth and its colossal heart.”

In 2007, Aaron published his first novel, Rise, Do Not Be Afraid, also published by Ghost Road Press in Denver. Annie Dawid wrote a review in of High Country News:

“Entering Colorado poet Aaron Abeyta’s first novel, Rise, Do Not Be Afraid, is like visiting a world that no longer exists — if it ever did. Santa Rita, the mythical Western town that forms the subject of this short, dense novel, is a place reminiscent of Eden, both before and after the Fall. One is reminded of Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional Colombian town, Macondo, as Abeyta creates a culture in a specific place and witnesses its dissolution — from greed, abandonment, the withering of love. Like García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Abeyta begins with an annotated cast of characters, for it’s easy to confuse the people in this novel. Abeyta moves through time and generations as if through memory: ‘That was 1926,’ when the fences were built, we are told in the same paragraph in which we have traveled even further back to the arrival of the treacherous Matthews family in 1878. ‘Santa Rita sat in a long and deep canyon cut by an ancient river of ice, now melted to a river that flowed east toward the Rio Grande. There was no TV reception in Santa Rita. Most news traveled like it always had, by word of mouth.’ ”

Aaron is the recipient of a Colorado Council on the Arts fellowship for poetry. He earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University. He lives in southern Colorado where, as he says in his bio, he can remain close to his family and culture, both of which greatly influence his work. Abeyta was born in 1971.