Vincent Toro
“An artist’s greatest asset is their insatiable hunger for knowledge. So much about what I love about my work as both a writer and educator is that I am constantly learning. I see knowledge as the well from which I draw in order to create. The deeper that well is, the more materials I have at my disposal, the more options I have when I set to work.”
“Virtuosic . . . one of our most talented and daring poets . . . Hivestruck crackles with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit.”
“Tertulia is explosive; it detonates on all levels: tradition, comic, formalistic, political, and diaspora. There are not enough poetics in the world to define or categorize Toro’s work. You might flinch when you read these poems, so arm yourself.”
“Toro’s poetry is exuberant and often comic, celebrating Latinx identity and culture in America even as it flags injustice and inequality at every turn.”
“Icepick-perceptive . . . A rich, ambitious, and inventive observation of Latinx life in America.”
“Toro’s evocative portrayal of intergenerational migrant realities reveals what it’s like to be “neither boundary/ nor center/ neither master nor serf.”
Vincent Toro is a poet and playwright from New York. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia (Penguin Poets, 2020), which was a finalist for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and Stereo.Island.Mosaic. (Ahsahta Press, 2016), which was awarded the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His next book is Hivestruck, coming from Penguin Poets in August 2024. Vincent’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry Daily, Split This Rock, BOAAT, Small Axe Journal of Caribbean Literature, The Buenos Aires Review, The Acentos Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Vinyl Poetry, Omniverse, Anomaly, Saul Williams' CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Misrepresented People, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.
He is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writers Fellowship. He has performed, lectured, and taught creative writing and theater nationally and internationally, is a Dodge Foundation Poet and a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. He has been awarded artist residencies by the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain, and received the Amiri Baraka Scholarship to attend Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program.
He has taught creative writing, literature (with focuses on Latinx literature and Global Contemporary Poetry), and theater in public schools, private schools, colleges and universities, community centers, juvenile detention centers, elder care facilities, and non-conventional learning spaces throughout the United States. He has performed throughout the U.S. and internationally, including in Spain, Argentina, and England, and has collaborated and shared stages with countless writers, musicians, and multidisciplinary artists from around the country, most recently with Grammy winning Jazz artist Christian McBride for “A Beautiful Bond,” a jazz poetry performance which he co-curated, co-wrote, and performed in as part of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s City Verses series.
In an interview with John Manuel Arias in Electric Literature, he was asked about the role of musicality in his work: “I’ve often confessed that I am a poet because I was not able to become a musician. Music is an absolute obsession of mine. With poetry I can create a kind of music, though it never fully subdues that longing I have within me to have been a great singer or instrumentalist. The influence of the music I love is spilling out on every page of my books, to be honest. The records I was listening to when I was working on these collections impacted the formal structures of the poem, their syntax and rhythms, and their thematic elements. Tertulia is in many respects a dialogue with the music, films, and books I was digesting at the time I was crafting those poems.”
He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, where he teaches creative writing and playwriting. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University.
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