Requiem for the Innocent

A provocative and somber tribute to those who lost their lives and were injured in the mass shooting in El Paso.

On August 3, 2019, a mass shooting occurred at Walmart Supercenter #512 in El Paso, Texas. A twenty-one-year-old white supremacist from El Paso targeted “Mexicans” and shot and killed twenty-two people: thirteen Americans, eight Mexicans from nearby Ciudad Juarez, and one German, and injured twenty-seven others. It was the seventh deadliest mass shooting in the United States since 1949 and the deadliest attack on Hispanic and Latina/o Americans in U.S. history.

This chapbook and the traveling exhibition that accompanies it are meant to honor the memory of those twenty-two beautiful, innocent beings who lost their lives in El Paso on that summer day and to help heal not only the twenty-seven others who were injured, but the countless others in America, New Zealand, Norway, and the world who suffer and have suffered from hate in whatever form it takes. All royalties earned from the sale of the chapbook and all special collections received at the exhibit are being donated to the families of those who died and were injured on that fateful day in El Paso.

John Willis is Professor of Photography at Marlboro College and a co-founder of the In-Sight Photography Project (www.insight-photography.org) and Exposures Cross Cultural Youth Photography Program (www.exposures-program.com). He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fel-lowship in Photography after Views from the Reservation was first published in 2010. His photographs are in more than sixty collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, J. Paul Getty Museum, Heard Museum, High Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Muse-um of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Gallery of Art. His other books are Recycled Realities, a collaborative effort with photographer Tom Young (Center for American Places, 2005) and Views from the Reservation: A New Edition (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2019). His Website is www.jwillis.net.

Robin Behn is a poet and Professor of English the University of Alabama, where she teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry in 1999 and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the state arts councils of Alabama and Illinois. Behn is the author of five volumes of poems, most recently Quarry Cross (Madhat Press, 2018), and two chapbooks. She is co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach (William Morrow, 1992) and editor of a book for young writers forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press, Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing.

Matan Rubinstein, a professor of music at Marlboro College, is a composer/improviser and electronic musician who is active across a wide range of contemporary music making. He has composed works for chamber groups, orchestra and jazz orchestras, as well as for dance, film, television, and interactive media. He is also a performer and has made several recordings, including Sada (2012) and Soundtracks and a String Quartet (2010). His most recent project, the Marlboro Slipstream Group, a quartet of composer/performers, is an Ensemble-in-Residence at Marlboro College.