Gustavo Pérez Firmat


A writer and scholar, Gustavo Pérez Firmat was born in 1949, Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida. He attended Miami-Dade Community College, the University of Miami, and the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He taught at Duke University from 1979 to 1999 and is currently the David Feinson Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Pérez Firmat is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. In 1995, Pérez Firmat was named Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year. In 1997 Newsweek included him among “100 Americans to watch for the 21st century” and Hispanic Business Magazine selected him as one of the “100 most influential Hispanics” in the United States. In 2004 he was named one of New York’s thirty “outstanding Latinos” by El Diario La Prensa. In 2005 he was selected Educator of the Year by the National Association of Cuban American Educators. GPF has been featured in the documentary CubAmerican and in the 2013 PBS series Latino Americans.

Works

Pérez Firmat is the author of books and essays on Latinx literature and culture. His books of literary and cultural criticism include:
He has also published several collections of poetry in English and Spanish: Carolina Cuban, Equivocaciones, Bilingual Blues ; Scar Tissue ; The Last Exile ; Viejo verde ; a novel, Anything But Love ; and a memoir, Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America. Pérez Firmat’s poems have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies.
Next Year in Cuba was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction in 1995. Life on the Hyphen was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award for 1994 and received Honorable Mention in the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.

Interviews