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Rane Arroyo is a Puerto Rican/Latino who was born in
Chicago, the city where he began his career as a performance artist in the art
galleries of the 1980's. Falling in love with the writing aspects of his solo
theater work, he began publishing poems and stories in small and major magazines and eventually found a wide
readerships from many different groups.
Beside being included in the newest Heath
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Arroyo won the 2004-05 John Ciardi Poetry
Prize for The Portable Famine; the 1997 Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize for
his book The Singing Shark; a 1997 Pushcart Prize for the poem "Breathing
Lessons" as published in Ploughshares.
He is a professor at the University of
Toledo. Arroyo earned his Ph.D. in English/Cultural Studies from the
University of Pittsburgh where he wrote his dissertation on issues
surrounding the Chicago Renaissance that parallel the building of a
contemporary Latino literary canon. He is currently the co-Vice
President of the Board of Directors for AWP (Association of Writers and
Writing Programs) and also the co-Chair for the 2009 Chicago
Conference.. Recent scholarship on his poetry has focused upon or will
focus upon Arroyo's Caribbean sequences, his rewriting of modernist
texts, Bruce Springsteen's presence in his poetry, and his gay
Chicago's use of masculine spaces in his work.
