Biography |
Robert Vasquez was born and raised in the Central Valley. He was educated at California State University, Fresno (BA in English), the University of California at Irvine (MFA in English), and Stanford University (Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing). Having spent over 300 weeks in creative writing workshops as a student, he studied with numerous poets and writers, including three Pulitzer Prize winners and two Nobel Prize laureates. Vasquez has won several literary awards, including three Academy of American Poets Prizes, three National Society of Arts & Letters Awards, a National Writers Union Award, and—for his book At the Rainbow (University of New Mexico Press)—the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award. His poems have appeared in various national periodicals, including The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Missouri Review, The New England Review, The Notre Dame Review, Parnassas: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, VerseDaily.org, and The Village Voice, and in several anthologies, including After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (David R. Godine), The Atomic Bomb (Nextext Books), Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press), California the Beautiful (Via Books), The Geography of Home (Heyday Books), Highway 99 (Heyday Books), How Much Earth (Heyday Books), Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets (Silver Skates), Proud Harvest (Seven Buffaloes Press), Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (Heyday Books), and Writing Home: Award-Winning Literature from the New West (Heyday Books). In 2007/08 some of his work appeared in the anthology Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (University of Nevada Press) and in the chapbook Braille for the Heart (Momotombo Press/University of Notre Dame). In 2004 he was the inaugural final judge for the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, a first-book competition sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Press and the Notre Dame Institute for Latino Studies. In addition to teaching creative writing at the University of California campuses at Irvine and Santa Cruz, Vasquez was the King/Chavez/Parks Visiting University Professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Western Michigan University in the mid 1990s, and in 2000 he was Visiting Associate Professor and Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis. Because of his love for the Central Valley, he declined two tenure-track university professorships in creative writing and one instructorship in creative writing which would have required him to relocate elsewhere. Since 1991, Vasquez has been on the permanent faculty at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, CA. |
