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Photo Credit: VONA

Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. He has also been published in The New York Times Magazine and Bomb and his children's book, Visiting Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Honor. He is a NYFA Arts Fellowship winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, a Urban Artists Initiative/NYC grant recipient and was recently a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is currently Artist-in-Residence, Workspace, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books.

 

Smoking Lovely
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Paperback: 68 pages
Publisher: Rattapallax Press (January 15, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1892494612
ISBN-13: 978-1892494610
Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches

Smoking Lovely, Willie Perdomo's second volume of poetry, confirms his hard won place in American letters. Addiction, poverty, class and racial identity, love and recovery are examined with a devastating and streetwise voice, marked with irrefutable artistic integrity and craftsmanship. These poems sing, howl, and heal with a sad and searing wisdom akin to genius. Smoking Lovely is destined to become not just one of the best books of the year but of the decade."
Sapphire, author of Push and Black Wings & Blind Angels  

"Whether we're talking Puerto Rico or the US, the Poetry Society of America or the corner of 123rd Street and Lexington Avenue, there is no poet alive who can match the lyrical intelligence, ferocious wit and searching humanity of Willie Perdomo. Perdomo is the hurricane we all write home about. He is to the word what lightning is to the sky. He is Langston and Hector (Lavoe) and Whitman and Mír. He is the heart in struggle with itself. Perdomo writes damnation as though it were heaven and breaks the ordinary -- a mother calling her children home, a weed-trip to Brixton, heartbreak -- into gold. He's the Puerto Rican diaspora's unofficial poet laureate and what he knows about being of color, being between languages, being poor, being a man, being in trouble, could save your life."
Junot Díaz, author THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize  

 

Where a Nickel Costs a Dime: Poems
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Format: Paperback, 128pp.
ISBN: 0393313832
Publisher: Norton,Ww
Pub. Date: January  1996
Edition Desc: BOOK & CD

Drawing on rap, jazz, Langston Hughes and the rhythms of the streets, this collection bristles with congas, timbales, police sirens and wino oracles, "singing a celebration of the island/ that some of us will never see." In poems that are scalding, toxic and dizzying, Perdomo reminds us that there is something wrong when feeling joy suggests mangled sanity: "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I noticed I went to more funerals than parties this summer."
―excerpted from Publishers Weekly Review

 

Visiting Langston
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 Willie Perdomo (Author), Bryan Collier (Illustrator)

ISBN: 0805067442
Format: Hardcover, 32pp
Pub. Date: January 2002
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
Edition Description: 1ST

A 2003 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Award Winner

A little girl and her father visit the house where acclaimed African-American poet Langston Hughes lived. A poet herself, the girl is thrilled. This beautifully illustrated story is a great introduction to the legendary writer.

"Today I'm going to wear
My favorite pink blouse
I'm going with my daddy
To visit Langston's house."

It's a special day when a little girl and her father go to visit the house where the great poet Langston Hughes lived-especially when the little girl is a poet herself!

This rhythmic tale is a wonderful introduction to the work and world of Langston Hughes, who was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and an American cultural hero.

 

Postcards of El Barrio
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Paperback: 105 pages
Publisher: Isla Negra Editores (2002)
Language: Spanish
ISBN-10: 1881715906

La poesía de Willie Perdomo se instaura con voz propia y singular. Cada poema se cuela en el canon de la literatura Nuyorican para impartirle una nueva vida. El va más allá de la identidad que en un principio caracterizó la obra de los poetas puertorriqueños en Nueva York.

The poetry of Willie Perdomo places itself with his own and singular voice. Each poem reorganizes the cannon of Nuyorican poetry and gives it a new life. He goes beyond the issue of identity that in the beginning defined the works of New York based Puerto Rican poets.

 

Perdomo's work may also be found in:

Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
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Kevin Powell, Editor

Format: Hardcover, 470pp.
ISBN: 0471380601
Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
Pub. Date: October  2000

Read more about the contributors to this fantastic volume of work

The best work of hip-hop generation writers captured in a single volume

From fiction writers, poets, journalists, and commentators, this absorbing anthology captures, for the first time, the new school of black writing, including established and award-winning authors like Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Danyel Smith, and Paul Beatty, as well as emerging voices from around the world. In addition to showing today's literary flowering, Step Into A World provides a window into the crucial issues of contemporary black life, including racial and sexual identity, post-civil rights politics, and hip-hop culture. Compiled by critically acclaimed poet, journalist, and essayist Kevin Powell, this groundbreaking book is a revelation.

Kevin Powell (Brooklyn, NY) is a critically acclaimed poet, journalist, and essayist. He is the former senior editor for Vibe, and has been published in dozens of periodicals, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, George, Essence, and One World.

"Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness. Step into a World is a kaleidoscope into the world not bound by artificial constructs like nation. John Coltrane recorded ‘Giant Steps,’ which is a riff on the sight and sounds in his muse. Powell plays the computer with equal astuteness." –Nikki Giovanni

"Those of us who pay attention were aware that the younger generation of blackwriters was being smothered by the anointment of talented tenth Divas and Divuses, and their commercial accommodationist ‘Fourth Renaissance. ’This anthology is indeed a breakthrough! It combines the boldness and daring of hip-hop with the intellectual keenness of a Michele Wallace or a Clyde Taylor." –Ishmael Reed

"In a culture where videos, the Internet, and other high-tech communication is being consumed like the latest mind-altering drug, how does great literature grow and survive? These writers will answer that all-important question. This anthology provides a clue, a hint, as to where we might be going. They are resisting all this vacant, empty-minded nothingness. Read them. Listen to them. If you don’t, you do so at your peril." –Quincy Troupe

 

Listen up!: Spoken Word Poetry
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Zoe Angelsey (Editor)

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine; 1 edition (March 30, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345428978

"Today, the poetry scene flourishes at New York open-mic spots like the Nuyorican Poets Café, Brooklyn's YWCA Tea Party and Harlem's Sugar Shack. Progeny of hip poets--the Beats of the 50s and protest poets of the 60s and 70s--these up-and-coming literati cast their diverse spells of word beats inspiring young contemporaries in Cleveland, Ohio, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta; later branching out internationally to poetry circuit venues in Tokyo, Rio de Janiero, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Istanbul."  —Zoë Anglesey

Click to read more about this book

 

 

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