Ricardo Pau-Llosa


Ricardo Pau-Llosa is a Cuban-American poet, art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction.

Early life and education

Pau-Llosa was born into a working-class family in Havana. In 1960 Pau-Llosa fled Cuba with his parents, older sister, and maternal grandmother — all of whom emerge in his autobiographical poems of exile and remembrance. He graduated from Belén Jesuit Preparatory High School in Miami in 1971, and went on to major in English at various universities, among them Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, and the University of Florida.

Career and writings

His first book of poetry, Sorting Metaphors, won the first national Anhinga Prize for Poetry selected by William Stafford. He published a second book of poetry in Bread of the Imagined. His third book of poems, Cuba, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest collections are Mastery Impulse and Parable Hunter, both from Carnegie Mellon.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa and Enrico Mario Santi have published a bilingual volume of poetry, "Intruder between Rivers/Intruso entre rios", with Pau-Llosa's English originals and Santi's translations of "Cuban" poems which present bilingual poetry with Cuban or Cuban exile themes casting Pau-Llosa's elegant English prosody into the original Cuban Spanish of both memory and daily experience. This book collects 25 of Cuban-American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa's excellent poems along with its translations into Cuban Spanish by poet-scholar Enrico Mario Santi.

Additional bibliography