Overview

Willie Perdomo is a prize-winning Nuyorican

Nuyorican

Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State especially the New York City metropolitan area, or of their descendants...

 poet and children's book author. He is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), Postcards of El Barrio (Isla Negra Press, 2002), and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax Press, 2003), which received a PEN American Center

PEN American Center

PEN American Center , founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. The Center has a membership of 3,300 writers, editors, and translators...

 Beyond Margins Award. His children's book, Visiting Langston, received the Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.Mrs...

 Honors. Perdomo was also the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts

New York Foundation for the Arts

The New York Foundation for the Arts was created in conjunction the in 1971. The organization gives grants to individual artists and writers and developing arts organizations with a mission to '.'-NYFA's Programs:...

 Poetry Fellowship in 2001, and a Fiction Fellowship in 2006. He is a Pushcart Prize

Pushcart Prize

The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured....

 nominee, and recently was a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. He is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books and teaches in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

.

Performance

He was a member of the 1991 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team and has performed his poetry on PBS' The United States of Poetry and HBO's Def Poetry. He first read poetry aloud on a mic for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

Nuyorican Poets Café

The Nuyorican Poets Café is a non-profit organization in Alphabet City, Manhattan. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City, USA, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy and theatre.-History:...

 at age twenty-two. Despite being featured on many documentaries about poetry in performance, Willie Perdomo considers the performance to be secondary to the writing and rejects the performance poet

Performance poetry

Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.-History:...

 label. He does, however, feel that powerful oral delivery of his poems can bring his words to more people.

He was also a collaborating artist in Rhythmicity at The Humana Festival of New American Plays

Humana Festival of New American Plays

Humana Festival of New American Plays is an internationally renowned festival that celebrates the contemporary American playwright. Produced annually in Louisville, Kentucky by Actors Theatre of Louisville, this prestigious event showcases new theatrical works and draws producers, critics,...

 (2002–2003) season.

Style and Influence

Perdomo writes about the issues of East Harlem such as race, violence, addiction, and poverty. He often employs hip-hop rhythms, spanish words, and a politically-motivated anger. While race and culture are important to his Nuyorican poetry, he admits that his work is representative of himself, not his whole culture. In his own words, "I'm not here to represent a whole race of people. I can't do that." His literary influences range from Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...

 and Piri Thomas

Piri Thomas

Piri Thomas was a writer and poet whose autobiography Down These Mean Streets became a best-seller.-Early years:...

 to Rilke and William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

. He describes his poetic prowess to lie in the "ability to be universal without having to sacrifice the power of that East Harlem idiom."

Biography

Willie Perdomo grew up in predominantly Spanish East Harlem, New York. His father emigrated from Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...

 in his early twenties. Perdomo's dark skin led to many assumptions that Perdomo is African-American, despite his purely Puerto Rican heritage. He attended public schools until sixth grade, when he won a scholarship to Friends Seminary

Friends Seminary

Friends Seminary is an elite private day school in Manhattan. It is owned and controlled by the New York Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The school, the oldest continuous coeducational school in New York City, serves 694 college-bound day students in Kindergarten through...

, a private Quaker school in lower Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

. This proved to be a shocking shift for inner-city Perdomo, unaccustomed to Quaker ways and suddenly surrounded by white prep-school boys. He got into a few fights there before he met a friendly school receptionist named Ed Randolph who told him, "You need to reroute this energy you have." Soon after hearing this advice, teenage Willie heard Ed read some of his poetry. He was inspired and began writing poems to submit to Ed for criticism. Ed became Perdomo's mentor, helping to craft his voice and style. By his senior year he was published in the New York Public Library publication New Youth Connections. After graduating from Friends Seminary, he moved to nearby Ithaca College

Ithaca College

Ithaca College is a private college located on the South Hill of Ithaca, New York. The school was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a conservatory of music. The college has a strong liberal arts core, but also offers several pre-professional programs and some graduate programs. The college is...

 and studied a variety of subjects. He currently lives in New York City and is working on his next project, Emergency Money.
Perdomo is Co-Publisher of Cypher Books, a publisher of today's most necessary poetry. Visit Willie's web site at www.willieperdomo.com.

See also

• List of Puerto Rican writers
• List of Famous Puerto Ricans
• Puerto Rican literature