Biography
Prof. Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, stage performer, and educator from New York. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia (Penguin Random House), which was a finalist for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and Stereo.Island.Mosaic. (Ahsahta 2016), which was awarded the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His plays have been staged at the Spanish Repertory Theater, where he is a two-time winner of the Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award.
Prof. Toro is also recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship, and The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, The Alice James Book Award, and the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. As a theater director, Prof. Toro received the city of San Antonio’s Golden Globe for Best Direction for his staging of Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori Parks. He has been awarded artist residencies by the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain, and received the Amiri Baraka Scholarship to attend Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program.
Prof. Toro has been published in dozens of national and international publications, including The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Washington Square, The Acentos Review, Huizache, The Buenos Aires Review, The Hawai’i Review, A Gathering of the Tribes, Chiricú Journal of Latina/o Literatures, and in the anthologies Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Saul Williams’ CHORUS, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.
He is also poet in the schools for the Dodge Poetry Foundation and a contributing editor with Kweli Literary Journal, which publishes and promotes the work of writers of color in the U.S. From 2006-2011, Prof. Toro was Director of Performing Arts and Literature at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. He has taught creative writing, literature (with focuses on Latinx literature and Global Contemporary Poetry), and theater in public schools, private schools, colleges and universities, community centers, juvenile detention centers, elder care facilities, and non-conventional learning spaces throughout the United States. He has performed throughout the U.S. and internationally, including in Spain, Argentina, and England, and has collaborated and shared stages with countless writers, musicians, and multidisciplinary artists from around the country, most recently with Grammy winning Jazz artist Christian McBride for “A Beautiful Bond,” a jazz poetry performance which he co-curated, co-wrote, and performed in as part of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s City Verses series.