About: Abelardo Delgado

Abelardo Barrientos Delgado, aka Lalo (November 27, 1931 – July 23, 2004), was a Chicano writer, community organizer, and poet. He was a major contributor to the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A professor in Metropolitan State University of Denver's Chicano/a Studies Department for 17 years, he was honored by the city of Denver posthumously in 2005 with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004, he was posthumously named Denver's first Poet Laureate. Metropolitan State University hosts the annual Lalo Delgado Poetry Festival; which celebrates Delgado as a social justice poet and "the grandfather of Chicano and Chicana poetry in this country."