Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. A graduate of Tufts and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he is the author of The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, one of Remezcla’s Best Books by Latine or Latin American Authors, and Silver Medalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award. He is also the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Colaterales/Collateral (National Poetry Series / Akashic Books, 2013) and coeditor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a bilingual anthology that raised funds for grassroots recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
Maldonado serves as the co-director of 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He is the board chair of the Poetry Project and serves on the board of directors of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Poetry Committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival. He is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo, Queer|Art|Mentorship, and the T. S. Eliot and Hawthornden foundations. He is currently part of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña / The Puerto Rican Literature Project, a forthcoming online database collecting the creative output of Puerto Rican poets in the diaspora and archipelago, developed in partnership with the University of Houston’s Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program and the Mellon Foundation. Recent collaborations include: “You Are the Prelude,” a commission for a new choral and orchestral piece by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón, which was performed at the reopening gala of New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall.
Photo by: Eric McNatt
Finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s
Norma Farber First Book Award
Silver Medalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera
Best Poetry Book Award
Featured in Remezcla’s Best Books
by Latine or Latin American Authors
The Life Assignment
In this quietly furious bilingual debut, Maldonado challenges the entanglements of power, queer love, money, and language against the backdrop of a post-hurricane Puerto Rico and a life of daily labor in New York City. The speaker grieves his separation from the body and community at the hands of an exhausting and enduring capitalism, and the terrifying numbness of work. “The capacity for words is debt,” he writes, “its history is arrogance,/ a fundamental economy in dark.” No reality is exempt from the violence of money. “Maybe the fish of the soul redeem us from our workdays,” he ponders in one poem, and in another, “wisdom made interesting sorrow of my inbox.” The poet refuses to concede to hierarchies of language: many poems appear in both English and Spanish, flowing into one another on the page. Here are powerfully imagined futures, where devastated cities are reillumined, the body is called back to itself, and people are emboldened by their collective melancholy. In these relentless rejections of empire, Maldonado reminds humanity of its inherent worth: “I loved. I loved,” he writes, “I love presently.”