Rane Arroyo

 

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.  Other awards include: Stonewall Books Chapbook Prize; The Sonora Review Chapbook Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize, and, recently, a 2007 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award in Poetry.

 

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.