American poet, playwright, and scholar
Ramón Arroyo (November 15, 1954 – May 7, 2010) was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.
Biography.
Ramón Arroyo was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Puerto Rican parents. He began his career as a performance artist in the Chicago art galleries of the 1980s and eventually expanded into poetry, for which he has become best known.
Arroyo earned his Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh where he wrote his dissertation on issues surrounding the "Chicago Renaissance" that parallel the building of a contemporary Latino literary canon. He served as the co-Vice President of the board of directors for the Association of Writers &amp; Writing Programs (AWP) and as the co-chair for the 2009 Chicago Conference.
His last public poetry reading was at SUNY/Brockport on March 31, 2010. His last three words to the public at that reading were: "Live. Then Write." It appears on the electronic version of the DVD Brockport made, in the SUNY Digital Repository [URL] The quote is at the end of his poem, "The Anonymous Reader" at 38:32. Those three words were words he not only lived by but demanded of his creative writing students.
Arroyo died in the early morning of May 7, 2010 due to a cerebral hemorrhage.
Critical reception.
Arroyo was included in the "Heath Anthology of American Literature" published in 2006; this book is commonly taught in English college classes in the U.S. He won the 2004–05 John Ciardi Poetry Prize for "The Portable Famine"; the 1997 Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize for his book "The Singing Shark"; and a 1997 Pushcart Prize for the poem "Breathing Lessons" as published in "Ploughshares". Other awards include: Stonewall Books Chapbook Prize; The Sonora Review Chapbook Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize, and a 2007 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award in Poetry.
Betsy A. Sandlin published an article on him ("Poetry Always Demands All My Ghosts: The Haunted and Haunting Poetry of Rane Arroyo") in a landmark issue of "CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies" on Puerto Rican queer studies. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes has also written about his work.
Legacy.
In 2012, Seven Kitchens Press announced the creation of the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Prize for an original, unpublished poetry manuscript. The editors for this prize are Dan Vera and Ron Mohring. The co-winners of the inaugural prize were Steven Alvarez and Rhett Watts.
In 2015, Arroyo was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
References.
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