Gloria Vando

Bio

Gloria Vando’s most recent collection, Woven Voices: Three Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives with Anita Velez-Mitchell and Anika Paris (2012, Scapegoat Press). Shadows & Supposes (Arte Público Press), won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Latino Literary Hall of Fame’s Poetry Book Award. She is the recipient of the 2009 Poetry Award from El Instituto de Puerto Rico, NY; the first Kansas Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship; two Billee Murray Denny Prizes; a River Styx International Poetry Award (Philip Levine, judge); and others. Her work is in many magazines, texts, and anthologies, including the 2007 Grammy-nominated Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work 1888-2006. She is publisher / editor of Helicon Nine Editions, an independent non-profit small press she founded in 1977 and for which she received the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award and the CLMP Editor’s Grant. She has served on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. and as judge for many literary contests including the National Poetry Series. She is a contributing editor of the North American Review. In 1992 she and her husband, Bill Hickok, founded The Writers Place, a literary center in Kansas City. They now live in Los Angeles, where she serves on the boards of the Venice Arts Council and Beyond Baroque, a literary center in Venice, California.