Robert Arellano
Robert Arellano (born July 12, 1969) is an American author, musician and educator from Talent, Oregon. His literary production includes pioneering work in electronic publishing, graphic-novel editions for Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, and five novels published by Akashic Books. His guitar-playing for Bonnie 'Prince' Billy is featured on 'I See a Darkness', which Pitchfork magazine named one of the Top 10 albums of the 1990s, and since the 1980s he has been writing and recording songs for solo projects and his group Havanarama. Life. Arellano was born in 1969 and raised in Summit, New Jersey. After  earning both Bachelor (1991) and Masters (1994) degrees from Brown University, he taught for a decade on Brown's Literary Arts faculty. In 1993 he used Storyspace to publish the Internet's first hyperzine, "LSD-50", on a Gopher server. In 1996, Sonicnet serialized his groundbreaking hypertext novel "Sunshine ’69" on the World Wide Web. Arellano is a founding member of the Literary Advisory Board of the Electronic Literature Organization and founding director of the Center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts at Southern Oregon University. He has been awarded the Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction (2014) and a Rockefeller Foundation  Literary Arts Fellowship (2016). His most recent novel, "Havana Libre", about the 1997 terrorist bombings of tourist destinations in Cuba, was published by Akashic Books in 2017. In 2012, Akashic published his novel "Curse the Names" about a reporter living and working in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and in 2010 his novel "Havana Lunar" was a finalist for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, nominated by the Mystery Writers of America. He has published fiction and essays in "Jane", "The Believer", "Tin House", and "The Village Voice". Music. As Bob Arellano, he has played guitar with Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie 'Prince ' Billy) on the albums I See a Darkness, More Revery, and Joya as well as in performance and on recordings with Papa M (David Pajo), Jodie Jean Marston, the Pathetics and Havanarama. In March of 2000, Arellano organized an international music exchange in Havana and Pinar del Rio, Cuba called "Rock the Blockade" featuring Cuban performers in concert with Will Oldham, Papa M, Speed to Roam, and Havanarama.