Jim Sagel
Jim Sagel was an influential American writer and educator known for his deep engagement with Hispanic culture in rural New Mexico. Born on June 19, 1947, in Fort Morgan, Colorado, he moved to northern New Mexico in 1969, where he became immersed in the local culture and language after marrying Teresa Archuleta. Sagel taught English and creative writing at various institutions, including Northern New Mexico Community College and the University of New Mexico. His literary work is characterized by its bilingual nature, addressing themes such as youth culture, the intersection of Hispanic and Anglo values, and Native American experiences.
Sagel’s notable collections include *Hablando de brujas y la gente de antes* and *Tunomás Honey*, the latter winning the prestigious Premio Casa de las Americas in 1981. His writing often explored generational conflicts and societal issues through the lens of eccentric, complex characters. Sagel's last book, *Unexpected Turn*, celebrated the landscapes and people of New Mexico. He passed away in 1998, but his legacy continues with the Jim Sagel/Red Crane Books Prize, established in his honor in 2000.
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Jim Sagel
Writer
- Born: June 19, 1947
- Birthplace: Fort Morgan, Colorado
- Died: April 6, 1998
- Place of death: Socorro, New Mexico
Biography
Jim Sagel converted himself from an Anglo into an intimate of Hispanic culture in rural New Mexico, writing poetry and stories in both English and Spanish that convey the region’s character. Sagel was born on June 19, 1947, in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Both sets of his grandparents had immigrated from czarist Russia. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Colorado in 1969. That same year, he moved to northern New Mexico and began working as a high- school teacher. He immersed himself in the culture. “There is something about the grandfatherly mountains, the isolated adobe villages and meandering arroyos that immediately invited me off the map,” he later wrote.
In 1970, Sagel married Teresa Archuleta and settled in the Española Valley. He learned Spanish, he joked, to protect himself from his in-laws, but in fact mastered the regional patois. From 1976 to 1981, he taught at Northern New Mexico Community College at El Rito and then became a professor of creative writing at the University of New Mexico at Los Alamos and the Institute of Creative Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Sagel died in 1998.
The first of Sagel’s many books, Hablando de brujas y la gente de antes: Poemas del Río Chama (speaking of witches and the old people: poems of the Chama River) contains poems in English, Spanish, and a mixture of both. They address aspects of local life in the Española area, such as youth culture, the clash between Hispanic and Anglo values, and Native American culture. Likewise, his fiction mixes Spanish and English in the northern New Mexican mode and reflects the prevailing temperament. Literary critic Lawrence Benton calls the stories “essentially studies of character.”
Sagel’s best-known collection, Tunomás Honey (1981), explores the conflict between generations by telling stories of eccentric characters that are both humorous and painful. These characters, which are composites of people he met, are handicapped, elderly, or self- deluding—“victims,” writing Benton, “of an ersatz culture which adopts the worst values of both nuevomexicano and Anglo.” In “Poco veneno no mata” (a little poison doesn’t kill), an elderly woman speaks of her fear of rest homes and medical treatment to a son who turns out to exist only in her imagination. “La Junta” concerns the clash over a plan by an Anglo developer to build a modern housing tract on traditional agricultural land, a clash in which locals and the developer embody a divided sociopolitical system. Sagel’s last book, Unexpected Turn (1997), contains, in his words, “road love poems” to New Mexico—prose poems about “beautiful landscapes” and “the most hospitable and civilized people in the nation.”
Sagel won Cuba’s Premio Casa de las Americas (sometimes called the Pulitzer Prize of Latin America) for Tunomás Honey in 1981, the International Prize of the journal Poesía de Venezuela in 1991, and El Premio Literario Ciudad de San Sebastian (Spain) in 1997, becoming the first non-Spaniard to do so. The Jim Sagel/Red Crane Books Prize was established in his honor in 2000.