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. In 2023, Perdomo received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
