Emilio de Armas

In the Wind (Poems and Songs) Emilio de Armas

In the Wind is the first collection of poems written in English by Emilio de Armas. The author was born in Cuba in 1946. His father was born in Santiago de los Caballeros (Dominican Republic) to an exiled Cuban family during the Cuban War of Independence, and lived and studied in North Carolina (US) until the United States entered the First World War. His mother was born in the Canary Islands (Spain), and migrated to Cuba with her family as a child. He grew up in an American sugar mill in Florida, a town in the Cuban province of Camagüey, where his father was a landowner. After completing his high school education in his hometown, he graduated from the University of Havana in 1972 with a degree in Spanish Language and Literature. His first book of poetry, La extraña fiesta, won an award from the University of Havana in 1979. His book Junto al álamo de los sinsontes was awarded the Casa de las Américas Literature for Young Readers Prize in 1988. From 1981 to 1988, he published five books in Cuba. In 1991, he was invited to give lectures on Cuban poetry in Argentina, where he applied for political asylum and was granted the status of refugee by the United Nations. He resided for six months in Buenos Aires, and traveled to the United States in 1992. Since then he has lived in Miami, Florida, where he obtained a Ph. D. in Spanish Language and Literature from Florida International University. In the United States, he has worked as a translator, editor, journalist and college professor of Spanish and English, and has published four books of poetry in Spanish, including Sobre la brevedad de la ceniza (Eugenio Florit Prize, Miami, 2002). His books of poems were collected in Una sola palabra (Emmanuel Publisher, 2015).