JACK AGüEROS, recipient of numerous awards and honors, has published poetry, fiction, plays, and children's stories. He has published two poetry books: Correspondence Between the Stonehaulers, and Sonnets From the Puerto Rican. His collection of short stories, Dominoes & Other Stories from the Puerto Rican, was published by Curbstone in 1993. For almost ten years he served as the director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, the only Puerto Rican Museum in the U.S. His translations of the complete works of Julia de Burgos, Puerto Rico's foremost poet, have finally made her works available to U.S. audiences. Song of the Simple Truth: the Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, for which Agüeros also wrote a lengthy introduction, is a literary landmark.

JULIA DE BURGOS, born in Puerto Rico in 1914, was an accomplished poet and journalist who was revolutionary in her politics, poetry and feminism. Avidly supporting the cause of Puerto Rican independence, she was also an internationalist who was anti-Franco, anti-Trujillo, and anti-Samoza. As a feminist and Puerto Rican independentista she paid for her convictions and strength by being persecuted as a political figure. A cultural icon, Julia de Burgos was shamefully neglected as a poet in her lifetime. She died in New York City in 1953. Click here for a video reading of Ay, Ay, Ay, de la Grifa Negra...

KEVIN BOWEN was drafted and served in the U.S. Army in the Vietnam war during 1968-69. He has since returned to Vietnam numerous times and currently serves as Director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. The Progressive magazine chose Bowen's first book, Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, as "Pick of the Year", and his second book, Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison, was published in 1998. With Nguyen Ba Chung, he translated the selected poems of Nguyen Duy, Distant Road. He lives in Dorchester, MA with his wife and two children.

NGUYEN BA CHUNG is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in The Boston Review, Compost, Manoa, The Nation, New Asia Review and others. He is co-translator of Le Luu's A Time Far Past and author of two collections of poetry in Vietnamese. At present he lives in Boston, where he works at The Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. At present he is at work on translating a volume of poetry from Vietnamese.

Books by the Poets available at W.E.B. Du Bois Library