Poet Ricardo Maldonado, Director, Academy of American Poets

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July 16th, 2024) featuring award-winning poet and President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets, Ricardo Maldonado.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large, is also featured on the show. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. 

Visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets and https://poets.org/poet/ricardo-alberto-maldonado.  Visit:  https://www.pamelampearce.com

 Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. A graduate of Tufts and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he is the author of The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, one of Remezcla’s Best Books by Latina or Latin American Authors, and Silver Medalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award. He is also the translator of Dinapier DiDonato’s Colaterales/ Collateral (National Poetry Series / Akashic Books, 2013) and coeditor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a bilingual anthology that raised funds for grassroots recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. 

Maldonado is the Academy of American Poets' President and Executive Director. Previously, he served as the co-director of 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo, Queer|Art|Mentorship, and the T. S. Eliot and Hawthornden foundations.

 Praise for The Life Assignment

 Lynn Melnick… Complex and unblinking, with heaps of sorrow and grace, Maldonado has a knack for the impossible, and for making his readers look headlong into it until we all come out the other side more compassionate and honest.

 Emily Skillings… This bilingual collection asks us to consider how we as readers and citizens reconcile self and state, body and landscape, desire and capital, language and communication . . .

 Urayoan Noel-The Life Assignment is, in its own startling terms, an ecology of late capitalist grief… This outstanding first book, merciless in its beauty and wit, is a ‘schema for our lapsed world,’ a way to make sense of our ‘somber city’ and ‘the grief / we happen to be around.