Ricardo Pau-Llosa



Ricardo Pau-Llosa (born May 17, 1954 in Havana, Cuba, lived in the United States since December 1960) is a Cuban-American poet, art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction.

Life
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 (literature) at various universities, among them Florida International University (BA, 1974), Florida Atlantic University (MA, 1976), and the University of Florida (1978–1981).

Career and writings
His first book of poetry, Sorting Metaphors (Anhinga Press, 1983), won the first national ,. He published a second book of poetry in Bread of the Imagined (Bilingual Press, 1992). His third book of poems, Cuba (Carnegie Mellon U Press, 1993), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest collections are Mastery Impulse (2003) and Parable Hunter (2008), both from Carnegie Mellon.