Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
Jesús Papoleto Meléndez is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, teacher, and activist born in Queens, New York, on June 13, 1950. While still in his teens, he worked for Teachers and Writers Collaborative and Poets-in-the-Schools in New York City.
Meléndez writes that he is, “one of the remaining original founders of the Nuyorican Poets’ Movement, a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians, and artists who are of Puerto Rican descent and who were brought up in New York City during the late forties and fifties, as a means to validate the Puerto Rican identity and experience in the United States.” His most recent publications by 2Leaf Press include Very Drunk / Borracho: Love Poems & Other Acts of Madness / Poemas de amor y otros actos de locura (2020); PAPOLíTICO—Poems of a Political Persuasion (2018); and Hey Yo! Yo Soy! 40 Years of Nuyorican Street Poetry (2012), a compilation of Meléndez's first three volumes of poetry, published in the 1970s.
When he relocated to California in 1980, Meléndez taught for the San Diego and Los Angeles city school districts through various programs, such as the California Arts Council’s Artists in Communities program, and the Young At Art program. He also served as the San Diego-area coordinator for the San Francisco-based statewide program California Poets in the Schools. He has twice been selected as one of sixty poets nationwide to be working in San Francisco, California, Washington, D.C., and the Bronx, New York, facilitating poetry and creative writing workshops through the Writers Corps division (Bronx Council on the Arts) of AmeriCorps. When Meléndez returned to New York in the mid-1990s, he worked for Teachers and Writers Collaborative and taught workshops at Boricua College. During his career, Meléndez was one of the first poetry facilitators to incorporate computer desktop publishing techniques and technology in the classroom, and as a result, has published numerous anthologies of students’ works.
He currently lives in New York City.
