Roberto Márquez

Translator, editor, essayist, and literary critic Roberto Marquez is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College. A Puerto Rican born and raised in Spanish Harlem, Márquez has traveled, lived, studied, and worked in various parts of Spain, South America, and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, Brazil, and Nicaragua.

An alumnus of Bronx Community College Operation Second Chance Program, Márquez received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1966 and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Peru (1966), he has also received National Endowment for the Humanities (1978–1979) and Tinker Foundation (1980–1981) Postdoctoral Fellowships, a Coordinating Council on Literary Magazines (CCLM) Editor's Fellowship Award for his work as founder-editor of Caliban: A Journal of New World Thought and Writing, and the Dorothy Blumenfeld Moyer Prize "for creative work in Languages and Literature" (1966).

Professor Márquez has served on the board of advisory editors of the American Quarterly, the advisory board of the Curbstone Press, the board of directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) (1981–1991), and on the editorial board of NACLA's Report on the Americas (1991–1996). He has served as a member of the advisory committee of the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize, on the international jury for the Premio Casa de Las Americas, as a member of the editorial board of the Massachusetts Review, and as area coordinator of the Migrant Education Program of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. A member of the board of trustees of Hampshire College from 1988 to 1996 and now trustee emeritus, from 1993 to 1995 he was also on the board of the Girls Club, Inc., in Holyoke. He has also served (1994–2000) on the board of directors of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and is an associate editor of the University of Virginia Press's New World Studies Series.

Recognized for the caliber of his many translations from the work of a wide variety of Latin American poets and writers and for his work in the field of Caribbean literary and cultural history, Márquez is the editor of several volumes of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén, including My Last Name and Other Poems, The Great Zoo, Patria o Muerte: The Great Zoo and Other Poems, and, with D. A. McMurray, Man-Making Words: Selected Poems. Márquez is also editor of the bilingual anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry. His essays, reviews, and commentaries have appeared in a variety of publications both in the U.S. and abroad, including Sin nombre (Puerto Rico), Casa de Las Americas (Havana), Escritura (Venezuela), Jamaica Journal(Kingstown), West Indian Guide (Baltimore and The Hague), Anales del Caribe (Havana), Ideologies and Literature, Latin American Research Review, the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice Literary Supplement, the Latino Review of Books, and the Latino/a Research Review.

A 1960 graduate of Aviation High School in New York City, and an aviation enthusiast, Márquez holds a private pilot's license with instrument rating.