Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996) and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), which won the 2004 PEN American Beyond Margins Award. His work has been included in several anthologies including Poems of New York, The Harlem Reader and Metropolis Found. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Bomb, and PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers. He is also the author of Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, illustrated by Bryan Collier. He has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry and has appeared on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam” and BET’s “Hughes’ Dream Harlem.” Perdomo is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction and Poetry Fellowships. He currently teaches at Friends Seminary and Bronx Academy of Letters.
Perdomo read in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall on August 30, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.