Sunset Poetry with Undercurrents: Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada reads at The Water Works on Thursday, October 22, from 6:30 to 7:30 PM. The evening is presented in conjunction with Undercurrents, an interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that turns the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern into an echoing chamber of sound, illumination, and memory. Original works by Houston poets form a soundscape that moves in sync with pulses of light across a mile-long network of LED lines. The night begins with the reading on the Wortham Insurance Terrace above the Cistern, and after that, the audience descends inside.

Tejada is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry in 2021. His collections include Mirrors for Gold (2006), Exposition Park (2010), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), and Carbonate of Copper (2025), which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His writing on art and media history includes National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment (2009) and the essay collections Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019) and the forthcoming Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (2026).

Tickets are $15. The reading is at The Water Works Cistern, part of Events at Buffalo Bayou Park at 105-B Sabine St in Houston.