The Poet and the Poem
2024-25 Series

Featured Quique Aviles

Click here for Quique Aviles podcast.mp3

Quique Aviles is a poet, performer, teacher, and social provocateur. Originally from El Salvador, he has been performing and leading community arts projects in the Washington DC area for more than 40 years. A graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Quique co-founded the LatiNegro Theater Collective in 1985 and art and social change organization Sol & Soul in 1999. Quique has written and performed 15 one-man shows dealing with issues of race, identity, and poverty, bringing his work to theaters and universities around the U.S., Mexico City, and San Salvador. He was the long-time Director of Paso Nuevo, GALA Hispanic Theatre's award-winning youth theater program, and is a current faculty member with The Theatre Lab's Life Stories Project. Quique's poetry and commentary have been featured on NPR's Latino USA and This I Believe, and in the anthologies How I Learned English, Al Pie de la Casa Blanca, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of Central American writers in the U.S. His first book of poetry, The Immigrant Museum, was printed in Mexico City in 2004. Quique has worked with filmmaker Ellie Walton to produce La Manplesa, a documentary film about the 1991 riots in DC's Mt. Pleasant's neighborhood. Currently, he is writing and directing Las Muertes Mas Bellas del Mundo/The Most Beautiful Deaths in the World, a documentary film about the Salvadorean diaspora in the Washington DC region through the eyes of Salvadorean artists.

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