Rigoberto González

n 2015, Rigoberto González received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. This public reading at the University of Missouri-Kansas City gives insight into his life as he reads vignettes and poems from his three books published in the same year: the memoirs, Red-Inked Retablos and Autobiography of My Hungers, and his poetry book that won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American poets, Unpeopled Eden. He talks about the influence of growing up in a migrant Mexican family, the power of literature, and his views on his responsibility to his communities of writers, gays, and Latinos.