Armando Romero (Colombia)
1944
Born in Cali, Colombia on the 28th December in 1944, Armando Romero, was, during his youth, part of Vanguard Movement (El Nadaísmo), led byGonzalo Arango. Among the group was Jaime Jaramillo, Eduardo Escobar Jotamario, Humberto Navarro, Fanny Buitrago, Amílcar Osorio, and many others. After leaving Colombia in 1967, Romero lived in Mexico and Venezuela. Years later, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1983, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Colombian poetry.
His literary and critical work has been translated into English, Italian, Greek, Rumanian, French, German, Arabic and Portuguese. Romero's critical text Las palabras están en situación: Un estudio de la poesía colombiana de 1940 a 1960 (1985) is considered by Colombian critics to be one of the most important books on Latin American poetry published in the twentieth century. Along with El Nadaísmo colombiano, o, La búsqueda de una vanguardia perdida (1988), it has been widely adopted in Colombian universities.
More recently Romero recently published two critical anthologies of Latin American poetry, Una gravedad alegre (2008) and Antología del Nadaísmo (2009).
Romero's novel La rueda de Chicago (2004) won the 2005 Latino Book Award for Best Adventure Novel at the New York Book Festival. In 2011 Romero won the Concejo de Siero International Award (Spain) for his fiction Cajambre.
Romero's numerous books of poetry include A vista del tiempo, selected poetry 1961-2004 (2005) and Versi liberi per Venezia (2010).
He has been invited to read internationally, and received an honorary doctoral degree from the National and Kapodstrain University Athens.
He has also written numerous books of short stories and other fictions, and has written seven books of poetry.
He currently lives in Cincinnati, where he is a Charles Phelps Taft Professor in Latin American literature at the University of Cincinnati.
BOOKS OF POETRY
El dominio y sum mano (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1975); Los móviles del sveño (Mérida: Ediociones de la gobernación del estado, 1975); El poeta de vidrio (Caracas: Editorial Fundarte, 1979); Las combinaciones debidas (Buenos Aires : Ediciones Último Reino, 1989); A rìenda suelta (with an introduction by Gonzalo Rojas) (Buenos Aires: Ultimo Reino, 1991); Hagion oros – El monte santo Caracas: Editores Pegueña Venecia, 2002); De noche el sol (Medellín: Eafit Publishing House, 2004)
“In Defense of Poetry and Freedom”
http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/en/Intro/romero.html