A poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist, translator, performer, activist, and educator born in Boyacá, Colombia and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2002 he was the first person of Latinx heritage elected as President of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant to research his family’s ancestral roots in Ecuador for a current novel project entitled The Thieves of Guevara. He has won regional, national, and international awards for his writing, including the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition (Postmortem, U of Georgia Press) and an International Latino Book Award (POEMA, U of Arizona Press). Across genres, he is known for a seriocomic writing style that investigates the overlapping of voices, experiences, and tensions that complicate immigrant life in the United States and throughout the global Latin American diaspora. He is Professor Emeritus of English and former Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is a current member of Voces de la Frontera and Wisconsin Conservation Voices.