Robert Fernandez, born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1980 and raised in Hollywood, Florida, is a poet, translator, and visual artist. He is the author of Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) as well as Pink Reef (2013) and We Are Pharaoh (2011), both published by Canarium Books. He co-translated Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” by Stéphane Mallarmé (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and his poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Chicago Review, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Mantis, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, Fernandez has received honors including a Yaddo residency, the New American Poet award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Robyn Schiff), a feature in Boston Review (introduced by Timothy Donnelly), a debut poet designation from Poets & Writers, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, and the Gertrude Stein Award. His essays and other writings on poetry have appeared with the Poetry Society of America, the Poetry Foundation, and in Poetry magazine, and his visual art has been featured in Poetry magazine and Caesura.
In addition to his original work, Fernandez’s ongoing translation projects include Antigòn by Haiti’s Félix Morisseau-Leroy, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone set in a Haitian context; an excerpt appears in The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation series. He is also working on a selected collection of poems by Colombia’s José Asunción Silva, some of which appear in The Chicago Review, The Elephants, and The Brooklyn Rail. Fernandez has further translated poems by José Asunción Silva and Benjamín Puche from Spanish to English for the Central Bank of Colombia, with the original Spanish texts featured on new Colombian banknotes.
contact@robert-fernandez.com