Willie Perdomo
Willie Perdomo received an MFA from Long Island University (LIU) Brooklyn. He is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix (Haymarket Books, 2021); The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Books, 2019); The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books, 2014); Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award (now, the PEN/Open Book Award); and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W. W. Norton, 1996), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is a coeditor with Felicia Rose Chavez and José Olivarez of the Breakbeat Poetry series anthology Latínext (Haymarket Books, 2020).
Perdomo was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a former recipient of the Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia University, a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow, winner of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the New York City Book Award, and the PEN/ Open Book Award.
The founder and publisher of Cypher Books, Perdomo is also a Lucas Arts Literary Fellow and a core faculty member at VONA/Voices of our Nation Writing Workshop. He currently teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 2021, Perdomo was appointed New York State Poet and served until 2023.
