Natasha Azank is an assistant professor of English at Tennessee State University. She earned her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and received a Master’s in English from Northeastern University. She has presented papers at the MELUS and American Literature Association conferences. Her research and teaching interests include fiction and poetry of the Puerto Rican diaspora, contemporary U.S. Latino/a literature, U.S. ethnic literatures, Caribbean literature, transnational studies and theory, postcolonial theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. In 2007, she won the University of Massachusetts Amherst John Hicks Essay Prize for a paper on Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Her dissertation, titled “‘The Guerilla Tongue’: The Politics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry” includes an analysis of Martín Espada’s canon.
Edward J. Carvalho is author of Puerto Rico Is in the Heart: Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work
of Frank Espada (Palgrave Pivot, 2013), coeditor with David B. Downing of Academic Freedom in the
Post-9/11 Era (Palgrave, 2010), and guest editor for the Works and Days special double issue Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University. He is the recipient of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania School of Graduate Studies and Research 2012 Outstanding
Research Award for his dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical: The Effects of Neoliberalism on the Life and Work of Martín Espada.” He holds an MFA from Goddard College (2006) and a doctorate in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2011). He is Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Health
Sciences at DeVry University in the Philadelphia Metro area.
Andy Croft is the author of Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Comrade Heart, Not Just a Game (with Sue Dymoke), and Red Sky at Night (with Adrian Mitchell). His books of poetry include Ghost Writer, Sticky, Three Men on the Metro (with Bill Herbert and Paul Summers), and 1948 (with Martin Rowson). He writes a monthly poetry column in the Morning Star and runs Smokestack Books. He lives in Middlesbrough, in the UK.
Michael Dowdy is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College, New York (CUNY). His published articles on Martín Espada include “Spaces for Congregation and Creative Play: Martín Espada’s and Victor Hernández Cruz’s Poetic Plazas” (College Literature) and “‘A mountain / in my pocket’: The Affective Spatial Imagination in Post-1952 Puerto Rican Poetry,” which analyzes the poem “My Name Is Espada” (MELUS). He is also the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press, 2013) and American Political Poetry into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2007). As poet, he has published the chapbook The Coriolis Effect (Bright Hill, 2007) along with individual poems in numerous journals.
Carmen Dolores Hernández has a PhD from the University of Puerto Rico. A freelance journalist specializing in literature, she has published weekly book reviews in San Juan’s Spanish-language daily El Nuevo Día since 1981 and has interviewed many of the leading figures in Latin American and Puerto Rican literature, among them Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska, and English-speaking authors like Martín Espada, Esmeralda Santiago, William Kennedy, and Derek Walcott. Puerto Rican Voices in English: A Book of Interviews (Praeger, 1997) is her third book and the first to be written in English. A viva voz: Entrevistas a escritores puertorriqueños (Norma, 2007) is a companion volume. She is a member of the Puerto Rican Academy of the Spanish Language and was recently named Doctor Honoris Causa by Sacred Heart University in San Juan.
Jeremy Larochelle is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he teaches courses related to literature and the environment. His dissertation, completed under the direction of Jorge Marcone from Rutgers University, examines the intersection between Latin American and U.S. Latino/a literature and environmental issues. His work in the growing field of ecocriticism in Spanish includes a focus on sustainability and environmental justice as alternatives to a more conservation-oriented U.S. environmentalism. He is currently working on editing a critical volume of recent poetry that originates from the Amazon basin. (As his grandfather was also a hotel bouncer, like Espada, and occupied a variety jobs, including professional wrestler, he feels a kinship to Espada in his early years.)
Peter Nelson works as a college archivist at Amherst College. He has previously worked as a teacher, grape picker, indexer, and furniture hauler. His poems have appeared in Red Weather.
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is currently a visiting professor affiliated with the Department of Government at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces during the 2013–2014 academic year, while on sabbatical from his position as a Research Professor of the Graduate Program in Human Rights and the Faculty of Law, Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), where he has taught since April 2006, and as Coordinator of the Center on Migration and Human Rights based at UACM since 2007. From 1993 to 2002 he was Research Professor at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico. He is the principal translator of Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (Duke University Press, 2013), has collaborated with Martín Espada on the only bilingual collection of poetry by Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez, The Blood That Keeps Singing: Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez/La sangre que sigue cantando (Curbstone, 1991), and is the leading translator of Espada’s own work in such titles as Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante (Curbstone, 1990), Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 2000), and La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos (Terranova, 2008). He is also the author, coauthor, or editor of several books, chapters, and articles regarding human rights issues published in both English and Spanish.
Eric B. Salo has a Bachelor’s in English Literature from Ball State University and a Master of Divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. He resides in Tucson and works there as a pastor. His research interests include the historical and contemporary practice of using persons with disabilities as sports mascots, particularly in baseball.
César A. Salgado is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and former Graduate Advisor in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches graduate seminars on colonial and postcolonial New World baroque literatures, the “Orígenes” group and journal in Cuban literary history, comparative James Joyce studies, Caribbean archival politics, and contemporary literary theory. His articles on Cuban, Puerto Rican, Latin American, and comparative literary topics have appeared in Revista Iberoamericana, Apuntes posmodernos, Revista Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, Journal of American Folkore, La Torre, and The New Centennial Review, among many others. He is the author of From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima (Bucknell University Press, 2001) and the editor of a selection of Martín Espada’s poetry, La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos (Terranova, 2008). He has worked as associate editor in two major reference encyclopedias, Latino and Latino Writers (Gale/Scribners, 2004) and Cuba (Gale/Cengage, 2011) and as coeditor and contributor in the forthcoming TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Oscar D. Sarmiento is an associate professor in Modern Languages at SUNY Potsdam. He has published articles on Latin American contemporary poetry and a book of interviews titled El otro Lihn: En Torno a la Practica Cultural de Enrique Lihn (University Press of America, 2001). More recently, his translations of poetry have appeared in Martín Espada’s La República de la poesía (MAGO, 2009). He is editor of the Chile poetry chapter for the Library of Congress’s Handbook of Latin American Studies and coeditor of poetry for the literary magazine Blueline.
Maritza Stanchich is an associate professor of English in the College of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she teaches U.S., Caribbean, and U.S. Latina/o Literatures. Her work on literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora and on circum-Caribbean readings of Faulkner has appeared in the journals Sargasso and Mississippi Quarterly, respectively. She has also published in Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the Caribbean in the American Imaginary (Macmillan, 2004) and Writing Of(f) the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2008). She previously worked as an award-winning newspaper journalist in New York, Washington, D.C., and San Juan, and has also worked for academic unionization at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and with the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios (APPU) in Puerto Rico.
Pauline Uchmanowicz is editor of the composition studies reader Considering Cultural Difference (Longman, 2004) and author of the poetry chapbook Sand & Traffic (Codhill, 2004). Her scholarship has appeared in College English, Composition Studies, Literature and Psychology, and other journals. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, New American Writing, Massachusetts Review, Z Magazine, and other national publications. A regular contributor to Woodstock Times, Chronogram, and other Hudson Valley publications, she is series editor of the annual Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award and associate professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where she directs the Composition Program.