Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Gustavo Pérez Firmat was born in 1949, Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida. He attended 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 the David Feinson Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He serves on the editorial advisory board of "Chiricú". Honors. Pérez Firmat is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment  for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. In 1995, Pérez Firmat was named Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year. 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 he was named one of New York’s thirty “outstanding Latinos” by "El Diario La Prensa". He was featured in the documentary "CubAmerican" and in the 2013 PBS series "Latino Americans". Works. Pérez Firmat is the author of books and  essays on Latinx literature, philosophy, and culture. His books of literary and cultural criticism include: 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); "The Last Exile" (Finishing Line Press, 2016); "Viejo verde" (Main Street Rag, 2019); a novel, "Anything But Love" (Arte Público, 2000); and a memoir, "Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America" (Doubleday 1995; rev. ed. 2000; rpt. Arte Público, 2005; Spanish version: "El año que viene estamos en Cuba", Arte  Público, 1997). Pérez Firmat’s poems have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies. "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 Award for 1994 and received Honorable Mention in the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovács Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.