A founding voice of the Nuyorican school, Victor Hernández Cruz published his first full-length collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), at the age of twenty after the 1966 chapbook Papo Got His Gun. Born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, he moved to the United States in 1954 and began writing at fifteen. His fourteen poetry collections include Guayacán (Ishmael Reed Publishing, 2022), Beneath the Spanish (Coffee House Press, 2017), and Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Cofounder of the Before Columbus Foundation and a former editor of Umbra, he held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2008 to 2013.
