Marcus Cafagña
Marcus Cafagña, author of The Broken World (University of Illinois Press, 1996) and Roman Fever (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), has poems in the anthologies Poets of the New Century, The Beacon Best of 1999, Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, On the Verge, Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, and in the journals Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Agni, Witness, Field, Boulevard, among others. His essay-reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review, and Harvard Review.
Born in 1956 in Ann Arbor, Cafagña attended Michigan State University, where his mentor was Diane Wakoski, and Vermont College, where he worked with Cynthia Huntington, Betsy Sholl, and Roger Weingarten. His first book was selected by Yusef Komuyakaa for the National Poetry Series in 1995. He served as curator for The Painted Bride Arts Center’s poetry series in Philadelphia. He was a visiting writer at Carnegie Mellon University, and has taught at Rutgers University and La Salle University. He now teaches creative writing at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, where he lives with his wife.
Marcus Cafagña remarks:
"I was raised by a family of immigrants, by people of Italian, Spanish, and Jewish heritage who loved to tell stories. As a child I played the violin but gave it up as a teenager to write poetry. The effect of the Depression and World War II on my family was immense and, since none of my relatives were writers, it fell to me to write their stories. During the 1960s, my mother and father were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). I literally learned to walk on a picket line. In high school, I joined other students in protest against the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, I worked for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ lettuce boycott of Safeway supermarkets in Denver, Colorado. These acts of protests have become the subjects of many poems."