Join us for the keynote reading by distinguished Puerto Rican poet Victor Hernández Cruz in conjunction with Poetry and Poetics at Northwestern’s Radical Poetics: Archives, Forms, Social Movements Symposium.
Cruz will read from his works at 5:00pm, April 24th in Harris Hall 108, with a light reception to follow. The reading is open to faculty, students, and the public.
Victor Hernández Cruz was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico and moved to New York City with his family when he was five years old. He started writing poetry early and at seventeen self-published his first book, Papo Got His Gun! And Other Poems, on a mimeograph machine. Cruz took part in the Nuyorican and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Victor Hernandez Cruz was one of the founders of the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the recognition of multicultural writers. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1981, Life magazine named him one of America’s greatest poets.
More than a dozen collections of Cruz’s poems—among them Snaps (1969); By Lingual Wholes (1982); Red Beans (1991); Rhythm, Content, and Flavor: New and Selected Poems (1989); and The Mountain in the Sea (2006)—have been published by traditional publishing houses.