In Skull Highway, Welsh mixes doses of border realism with Southwest mysticism and tops it off with insights from his Southern California youth.  The mixture has caused many critics, editors and writers to applaud his work.

While The Los Angeles Daily Journal has called him “one of America’s leading writers on life in border towns,” the El Paso Times noted that he’s “one of El Paso’s finest poets.”  In turn, Tony Moffeit, former poet in residence at the University of Southern Colorado, dubbed Welsh “the poet laureate of El Paso.”

“This book is uncanny and beautiful,” Moffeit said, after reading Welsh’s 1999 book Rusted Steel and Bordertown Starts.  It’s an evocation of outlaws, desert rats, dice, Marty Robbins, Mexican food joints, margaritas, Zapata, Villa, Bob Wills, iguanas, Ava Gardner, Ray Price, Freddy Fender, Juarez and Link Wray.  Welsh captures the
earthy outlaw beauty of the land.  He captures the spirit of the people.”

A winner of the Bardsong Press Celtic Voice Writing Award in Poetry, Welsh is an associate professor of English at El Paso Community College.  A former guest lecturer at UCLA, he has also taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and the Southern New Mexico Penitentiary. 

A first generation Irish-American, Welsh was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, and he first hitchhiked to New Mexico and Texas in 1989. 

He has served as a writer-in-residence at a wide range of schools and organizations, including the Border Book Festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and at the Booker T. Washington School for the Visual and performing Arts in Dallas.

He has won numerous journalism awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi Bill Farr Investigative Reporting Award, the Copley Los Angeles Newspapers Award, and the Jessie Steensma Endowment Scholarship. 
In 1992, the YMCA named him man of the year for his community service in South Central Los Angeles. 

NEWS:

LEADING NEW MEXICO PRESS
PUBLISHES SKULL HIGHWAY

El Pasoan Lawrence Welsh, who critics have called one of America’s leading writers on life in border towns, has just released Skull Highway, a new poetry collection published by La Alameda Press in Albuquerque.

After reading the pre-publication manuscript, poet and fiction writer Jimmy Santiago Baca called Welsh “a shaman with words,” one who “whirls flowers and moons and skies and adobe mud around and around and mixes them with his hard-won wisdom.” 

Kathleene West, poetry editor at Puerto del Sol, has also lauded his work, noting: “It’s getting harder and harder to pull off poems with Southwest imagery, but Lawrence Welsh has worked form, content and diction to make it all new again.”

A former award-winning journalist, Welsh has published six books and chapbooks of poetry during the past 15 years, and his poetry and fiction have appeared in about 200 national and regional magazines, including Puerto del Sol, The Louisiana Review, The Texas Observer, Hawaii Review, The Café Review, The Wormwood Review, Rio Grande Review, Nexus, Onthebus, Poetry Motel and the book Das Ist Alles–Charles Bukowski Recollected.   

J.B. Bryan, publisher and editor of La Alameda Press, has hailed Welsh as a first-rate literary voice.

“The poems of Lawrence Welsh seem cut down to their driest song out of debris found along an arroyo used as a border crossing,” Bryan said.  “These are minimal sketches with long resonance.  Each word shifts back and forth between archetype and prophecy, then into the essential thing itself.  This is the Southwest as experienced by hitchhiking mystics or simply a person walking away from a civilization caught up in its own demise.”

Continuing his appraisal, Bryan added, “When you get to the spot where these poems live, you might find Charles Bukowski and Lorine Niedecker roasting a jackrabbit over a campfire while sipping cold spring water.  Everyone stares at the universe looking for meteorites -- on Skull Highway you count any and every speck of dust as a blessing.”