Orlando Menes

Biography

An NEA Fellow, Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in the U.S. He considers himself Cuban American. Since 2000 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is Professor of English. Menes is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (University of New Mexico Press, 2022), Memoria (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), and Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). He also won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for Fetish (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like POETRY, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and the Hudson Review, among many others. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009).