B. 1952

Poet Vince Gotera was born and raised in San Francisco and lived in the Philippines for part of his childhood. He completed undergraduate studies at City College of San Francisco and Stanford University, where he earned a BA. He earned an MA at San Francisco University and both an MFA and a PhD at Indiana University.
 
In his narrative poems, Gotera engages themes of family life and romantic love and uses vivid imagery and a range of formal and metrical constraints. He is the author of the poetry collections Dragonfly (1994) and Fighting Kite (2007) and the critical volume Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans (1994). He is the editor of North American Review and has served as an editor of Asian America. In 1997, Gotera and Nick Carbó founded FLIPS, a listserv for Filipino/a literature and arts.
 
Gotera’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in Poetry, and a Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He has taught at Humboldt State University and is a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.