School of Music's Mark Cruz wins international guitar championship

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
University News Service
December 9, 2013

Mark Anthony Cruz of the Texas State University School of Music has won the 2013 Winfield International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship.

The championship is held annually in Winfield, Kan., at the Walnut Valley Festival. As an acoustic music festival with a 41-year history, it draws some of greatest professional and amateur folk art talent from across the U.S. and beyond.

Cruz has been a faculty member at Texas State since 1999, teaching classical guitar. As a performer, he was a two-time featured artist with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. He was also a featured artist at the Eastfield Guitar Festival in Dallas in 2008, the Classical Minds Guitar Festival in Houston in 2009 and the Sixth Annual Guitar Ensemble Festival in Plano in 2011. Tony Morris has highlighted Cruz’s all-original CDs Pequeñas Piezas para Mi Padre (2004) and Piezas Para El Mundo (2009) on the internationally syndicated radio program "Classical Guitar Alive." Both CDs received positive reviews in the scholarly periodical Soundboard.

For Cruz, winning the 2013 Winfield International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship comes after second-place finishes in 2001 and in 1993. Besides a cash prize, Cruz took home a Larrivée LV10E Deluxe Guitar.