Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Gustavo Pérez Firmat is a Cuban author and poet.

Early life

Pérez Firmat was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida. He was educated at 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.

Awards and accomplishments

Pérez Firmat has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2004 Pérez Firmat was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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 Pérez Firmat 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.

Career

Pérez Firmat is the author of many books and numerous essays and reviews. His books of literary and cultural criticism include:

* Idle Fictions (Duke, 1982; rev. ed. 1993)
* Literature and Liminality (Duke, 1986)
* The Cuban Condition (Cambridge, 1989; rpt. 2005)
* Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Duke, 1990)
* Life on the Hyphen (Texas, 1994; Spanish version: Vidas en vilo, Colibrí, 2000)
* My Own Private Cuba (Colorado, 1999)
* Cincuenta lecciones de exilio y desexilio (Universal, 2000)
* Tongue Ties (Palgrave, 2003).

He has also published several collections of poetry in English and Spanish-- Carolina Cuban (Bilingual Press, 1987), Equivocaciones (Betania, 1989), Bilingual Blues (Bilingual Press, 1995); Scar Tissue (Bilingual Press, 2005)--a novel, Anything but Love (Arte Público, 2000); and a memoir, Next Year in Cuba (Doubleday 1995; rev. ed. 2000; rpt. Arte Público, 2005; Spanish version: El año que viene estamos en Cuba, Arte Público, 1997).

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.

Pérez Firmat’s poems and stories have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies.

References

* Alvarez Borland, Isabel. "Cuban-American literature of exile: from person to persona." Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
* Dick, Bruce Allen. "A poet's truth: conversations with Latino/Latina poets." Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003.
* Dalleo, Raphael, and Elena Machado Sáez. "The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature". New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 133–158. [http://www.post-sixties.com www.post-sixties.com]
* Torres, Rodolfo D., and Francisco H. Vázquez. "Latino/a thought: culture, politics, and society." Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.