Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1954. He fled Cuba with his family in 1960, and in 1971, he graduated from the Belén Jesuit Preparatory High School in Miami, Florida. He received a BA from Florida International University in 1974 and an MA from Florida Atlantic University in 1976.
Pau-Llosa’s first poetry collection, Sorting Metaphors (Anhinga Press, 1983), was selected by William Stafford as the first recipient of the Anhinga Poetry Prize. Richard Wilbur writes, “Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s remarkable first book is full of poems which, however surprising or dream-like, are consistently lucid expressions of mind and world.”
Pau-Llosa is also the author of Fleeing Actium (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023); Man (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014); Parable Hunter (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008); Cuba (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Bread of the Imagined (Bilingual Press, 1992), among others. Also a critic of Latin American and Cuban art, Pau-Llosa lives in Miami.
