Vincent Toro | The Performance Poetry Preservation Project

Name and AKAs:

Vincent Toro

Websites and Social Media:

About the Artist:

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, stage performer, and educator from New York. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University. He is the author of STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC., which was awarded the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize. Vincent is a 3 time Pushcart Prize Nominee, 3 time finalist for the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award (which he won in 2011), a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, The Alice James Book Award, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, and the Artist’s Foundation creative writing fellowship. Vincent was the City of San Antonio’s November 2008 artist of the month, and he has been award artist residencies by the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain.

Vincent has been published in Washington Square, The Kenyon Review, Rattle, The Cortland Review, Queen’s Mob Teahouse, Split This Rock, The Acentos Review, Vinyl, Freeze Ray, Duende, The Buenos Aires Review, The Hawai’i Review, The Caribbean Writer, The Journal, Vallum, The California Journal of Poetics, Kweli, The Journal of American Studies Turkey, The Found Poetry Review, Narrative Northeast, Bordersenses, Anomaly, The Paterson Literary Review, Cloud Rodeo, Really System, Codex, Five Quarterly, Matter, and the anthologies Best American Experimental Writing 2015 (Wesleyan University Press), The Waiting Room Reader 2, and Saul Williams’ CHORUS.

Vincent is an English Professor at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College, a poet in the schools for Dreamyard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation, and writing liaison for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences Saturday Program. From 2006-2011 Vincent was Theater Director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. He is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.

His plays have been staged at The Spanish Repertory Theater, The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, The San Pedro Playhouse, INTAR, Teatro La Tea, and Raíces Theater Company.

Mr. Toro has performed throughout the U.S. and in Europe at events and venues such as The Dodge Poetry Festival (2006 & 2016), Princeton University, PEN/America, The New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Dixon Place, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Busboys and Poets, The Guild Complex in Chicago, The Poetry Society of America, Montclair State University, The Clemente Soto Cultural Center, The Langston Hughes House, The University of Texas San Antonio, The Bronx Museum, The San Antonio Museum of Art, Can Serrat in Spain, and the Association of Writing Programs conferences in Los Angeles (2016) and Washington D.C. (2017). He has collaborated with and shared the stage with poets and performers such as Saul Williams, Latin Jazz musician Bobby Sanabria, recording artist Moby, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

He is a member of The Macondo Foundation, founded by Sandra Cisneros, and is an active Board Member of GlobalWRITES, a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to increasing literacy through the unifying of poetry and technology.

CRITICAL MENTIONS:

“Toro is singing a call and response to the rich and deep history of Puerto Rican poetry, and it's one of the most beautiful books I have read in a long time. This book is a stereo belting out Spanish and English, sirening you in its fields of sea and cane. Like both the sea and the cane, [Stereo.Island.Mosaic] is at once salt and sweet.”
-Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother was an Aztec.

First-book author Toro dazzles with this energetic exploration of the Puerto Rican experience in the new millennium
-Rigoberto Gonzalez, Lambda Award winning author of Unpeopled Eden.

“Stereo. Island. Mosaic. is a work that moves forwards and backwards through itself, and collides in bursts of poetic beauty everywhere.”
-Ed Roberson, author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World.

“Sugar-slicked, tightly controlled lyric shifts and clever formal constraints allow Toro to confront the difficulty of truth-telling without self-exoticization.”
-Publisher’s Weekly

“Stereo. Island. Mosaic. raises the bar of Frost’s edict that collections of poetry should constitute a poem in themselves.”
-Scout Poetry

“Toro's desire to connect with the reader grows as the book does and leaves the reader feeling like they've had the best conversation of their life. Unlike verbal conversations, though, Toro's book stays and begs to be started again, turned over, and seen in another exquisite light.”
-The Collagist

ONLINE LINKS TO POETRY:

Acentos Review
http://www.acentosreview.com/August_2014/vincent-toro.html

Anomaly
http://anmly.org/ap26/puerto-rico-en-mi-coraz%C3%B3n/vincent-toro

Buenos Aires Review
http://www.buenosairesreview.org/2013/11/vincent-toro/

California Journal of Poetics
http://www.californiapoetics.org/poems/6745/aleatoric-by-vincent-toro/

Cloud Rodeo
https://cloudrodeo.org/issues/i-s-s-u-e-10/vincent-toro/

Codex
http://codexjournal.com/vincent_toro/

Cortland Review
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/68/toro.php

Duende
http://www.duendeliterary.org/vincent-toro-1/

Five Quarterly
http://fivequarterly.org/vincent-toro/

Found Poetry Review
http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/tag/vincent-toro/

Kenyon Review
https://www.kenyonreview.org/2016/11/house-gated-latinao-writers-resistance/