John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. He is a visiting lecturer this semester at Cornell.
Murillo read from his work on November 4, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.