The Poet's Prose and Other Essays

Roberto Márquez is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College. He is a graduate of Brandeis University, and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. An accomplished translator of Latin American poets and writers, Márquez is a recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Centennial Commemorative Medal in recognition of his "outstanding contributions" as translator and scholar of that poet’s work. He is Editor of the bilingual collection Latin American Revolutionary Poetry, and is also the editor-translator of Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times. The first collection of its kind, with the broadest historical scope yet available in English, it was awarded the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) 2008 Prize for Translation. He is Founder-Editor of Caliban: A Journal of New World Thought and Writing (1975-1981), and his most recent volume, A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, was published in the fall of 2010 to a positive critical reception. He has traveled, lived, studied, and worked in various parts of Spain, South America and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, Brazil, Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua.

Acknowledgments – Foreword – Culture, Race, and National Identity – José Carlos Mariátegui: Towards an Intellectual Portrait – Ah, de La Vida: Oscar Lewis’s Anthropology of the Wretched – The Poet’s Prose – Caribbeing: Island Latitudes and Spaces – The Specter of Races – Caribbeing – The Fresh Oases of Fraternity – Pedro Mir’s Countersong of Ourselves – The Stuff of Fiction – Puerto Rican Literature: A Bibliography – Isabelo Zenón Cruz’s Narciso Forty Years On – Of Diasporas and Latinidades – Hemispheric City – The Tempestuous Intimacy of Márgara Russotto – Our Afro-Latin Thing – An Island Heritage – Index.