Telephone: 646.801.4227
ODI GONZALES is an award-winning Peruvian poet who writes in both Quechua and Spanish. He holds a degree in Literature from Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa, holds an MA in Latin American literature from the University of Maryland and received his PhD from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru).
In collaboration with English-speaking writers and academics, Gonzales has translated into English a significant body of work on the Peruvian oral tradition, including myths, legends, and rituals, for the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D. C., National Geographic Television, and The National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. As a specialist in the teaching of Quechua, Gonzales has been a panelist at several indigenous language conferences, including the 2011 Symposium on Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.
Gonzales’s literary awards include Peru’s César Vallejo National Poetry Prize/el Premio Nacional de Poesía César Vallejo, from El Comercio, one of Peru’s leading daily newspapers, and the Prize in Poetry from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Lima. He has been a featured poet at numerous Latin American poetry festivals, including the 2005 International Book Fair of Guadalajara, at which Peru was the Honored Guest; the 2006 Festival Internacional de Poesía, in Medellín, Colombia; the 2006 Second Languages of America Poetry Festival sponsored by the UNAM of Mexico; the 2006 International Book Fair of Guadalajara, to which he was invited by the Indigenous Language Institute of UNAM; the 2007 the Ritual of the Word Intercultural Poetry Festival in Quito, organized by the Ecuadorean Ministry of Education and Culture; and other literary events and conferences in Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. He was a 2009 Lucas Artists Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California, where he composed a libretto in Quechua for an intercultural opera project.
From 1990 to 2000, Gonzales taught at Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa. Since 2000, the poet has divided his time between Peru and the United States. He is currently teaching courses in Quechua language and culture and prehispanic literature of the Andean region at New York University. The author of seven poetry collections, Birds on the Kiswar Tree is a bilingual edition of Gonzales’ La Escuela de Cusco (The School of Cusco) with English translation by Lynn Levin, his first English collection.