Edwin Torres was the 2016–2017 CPCW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice. Torres was born in New York City and came to poetry as a graphic designer in New York City’s East Village in the early 1990s. The iconic diversity of that neighborhood, along with the combined forces of Dixon Place, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the St. Marks Poetry Project, shaped his multidisciplinary approach to language. He was a member of the poetry collective Nuyorican Poets Café Live, which helped revitalize spoken word in the early 1990s, performing and giving workshops worldwide. He has conducted improvisations between poets and musicians, adorned envelope pants while wearing a brain of soil, and lectured on the agency of edge as a premise for trigger. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press, 2014), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books, 2010), In The Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books, 2009), and The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books, 2008). Torres has received fellowships from the DIA Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Poetry Fund, among other organizations. He has been juror for a number of awards and residencies; in 2016 he was the judge of the Andre Montoya Poetry Prize for the University of Notre Dame. Torres’ visual poetics have been exhibited at Exit Art and EFA Gallery in NYC, and a graphic retrospective, Poesís: The Visual Language of Edwin Torres, at the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago. His CD Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibit The American Century Part II. Anthologies include American Poets in the 21st Century: Vol. 2 (Wesleyan University), Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath Press), Post-American Poetry Vol. 2 (Norton), Best American Poetry (Penguin), Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems and Plays for Children (Black Radish Books), and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Holt). Torres has a dual career as a graphic designer, working in the field of advertising and design for over 25 years, becoming a self-proclaimed “lingualisualist,” fluent in the languages of sight and sound. He currently lives in Beacon, New York, with his wife and son.
