Robert Fernandez

Poet and editor Robert Fernandez was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Miami. He earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of the collections We Are Pharaoh (2011), Pink Reef (2013), and Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016). He is also the co-translator, with Blake Bronson-Bartlett, of Azure (2015), a translation of the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. In poems that take on ancient Egypt, the legacy of surrealism, and the news cycle, Fernandez follows the path of heat and light through both body and empire. In an interview with the literary journal THERMOS, Fernandez stated, “[I]n my work I consistently find myself trying to establish the conditions under which something like a struggle might emerge. Struggle is of interest to me in that, if it takes, it appears endless, ongoing, alive, and that it asks that the work submit to its own design and pursue its own values.”
 
Selected as a New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, Fernandez has won a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2006, he founded, with Mary Hickman, the chapbook press Cosa Nostra Editions. He lives in Iowa City.