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Introduced by Rigoberto González, editor of Latino Poetry.
This program is presented as part of “Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home,” a major public humanities initiative taking place across the nation in 2024 and 2025, directed by Library of America and funded with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emerson Collective.
Rio Cortez is a poet and the New York Times bestselling author of picture books The ABCs of Black History, The River Is My Ocean, and The ABCs of Women's History. Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax, was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and the Pen America Open Book Award. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem.
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is the author of Basic Needs (Rescue Press, 2021) and Images for Radical Politics (Rescue Press, 2016), which was the Editor's Pick in the 2015 Black Box Poetry Prize. Recent work has been featured in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Series, Dia: Chelsea’s Poetry&: Series, Tracy K. Smith's The Slowdown Podcast, The Poetry Project, PEN American and the Brooklyn Rail. She is a graduate of Tufts University and holds an MFA in Poetry from CUNY Brooklyn College and an MA from St. John's University. Of Colombian and Belizean descent, she is from and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her toddler and partner, the Ukrainian painter and muralist Misha Tyutyunik.
Urayoán Noel is a writer, translator, and performer from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Noel is the author of ten books in English and Spanish, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014, winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award); the performance text EnUncIAdOr (2014); and the poetry collections Boringkén (2008, named a Book of the Year by El Nuevo Día), Hi-Density Politics (2010, a National Books Critics Circle Small Press Highlights selection), and Transversal (2021, named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library). A Letras Boricuas fellow in poetry and the recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Center, Noel has been a finalist for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Poetry Series Paz Prize for Poetry, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Modern Language Association book prizes.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, and the author of two collections of poems, including, most recently, Promises of Gold—which was long listed for the 2023 National Book Awards. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Alongside Antonio Salazar, he published the hybrid book, Por Siempre in 2023. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Rigoberto González lives in Newark, NJ, and is the author of eighteen books of poetry and prose and editor of Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. His awards include Lannan, Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, the PEN/ Voelcker Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Contributing editor for Poets & Writers, he is the series editor for the Camino del Sol Latinx Literary Series at the University of Arizona Press. Currently, he’s Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
