Quick Facts
Biography
Ruben Quesada is a Costa Rican-American poet. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. His mother immigrated from Costa Rica in the 1970s, and, according to Quesada, "it was she who always told me that an education was the greatest gift I could give myself."
Career
Quesada earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at UC Riverside. He then went on to earn a Doctorate in English (Poetry and Poetics) at Texas Tech University.
Quesada serves as faculty at Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Columbia College Chicago and UCLA, where he teaches Latinx literature, literary translation, editing, and poetry writing. He is the founding member of the Latino Writers Caucus, which serves to promote the success of Latinx and Latin American writers at all stages of their career.
His extensive editorial career includes positions at The Cossack Review and co-founder of Stories & Queer. He is a former editor at The Rumpus and Iron Horse Literary Review. He is currently a Contributing Editor at the Chicago Review of Books.
Quesada's poetry appears in The Best American Poetry and has earned a Pushcart Prize nomination; his poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares and Cimarron Review, among others.
Publications
Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011), which "revels in the grounded, specific names and places of his California childhood, and invites them to join Zeus and Aphrodite in the pantheon of poetic allusion", and translator of Luis Cernuda: Exiled from the Throne of Night (Aureole Press, 2008). He is currently working on an anthology entitled Latino Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming).
In November 2018, a chapbook of poetry and literary translations titled, Revelations, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press.