José Kozer

José Kozer was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1940 to Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland (father) and Czechoslovakia (mother). He left his native land in 1960 and lived in New York until 1997, when he retired from Queens College as full professor, where he taught Spanish and Latin American literature for thirty-two years. After living for two years in Torrox (Málaga), Spain, he moved in 2004 to Hallandale, Florida. His poetry has been translated into English, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Greek, has been widely anthologized, and has appeared in numerous literary journals from around the world. A symposium on José Kozer’s poetry was held in 1997 at UC Irvine, organized by Professor Jacobo Sefamí, out of which a full length book, La voracidad grafómana: José Kozer was published by UNAM University in Mexico City (2002). ALDUS (México) published two books of prose by Kozer entitled Mezcla para dos tiempos (1999) and Una huella destartalada (2003), as well as Acta (2010), a book of poems written upon the death of the poet’s mother. A reissue of Bajo este cien (Fondo de Cultura Económica de México, 1983) was published in Barcelona by editorial El Bardo (2002). Moreover, Fondo de Cultura (México) published his Ánima (2002); Visor (Madrid) his Y del esparto la invariabilidad (2005); and Monte Ávila (Caracas) his Trasvasando (2007). Junction Press, New York, published a bilingual (Spanish/English) anthology of Kozer’s work Stet (2006), edited and translated by Mark Weiss. Shearsman (England) published a bilingual edition of Ánima (2011), translated into English by Peter Boyle. In 2010, his poetry was featured in some of the most important anthologies in the world, one by Norton, one by Gallimard (France), and one by Oxford University Press (England). His work has also appeared with Fischer Verlag (Germany), where only fifteen poets of the Latin American twentieth century have been published. He is the 2013 recipient of the Premio de Poesía Iberoamericana Pablo Neruda (Chile). A bilingual edition of Índole (Matanzas, 2012) with translation by Peter Boyle is due out in 2016 from University of Alabama Press.