Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, near the city of Granada on June 5, 1898. One of Spain’s most acclaimed poets and playwrights, he was also an accomplished artist and musician. As a young man, Lorca studied philosophy, literature, and law. He achieved prominence for his poetry in the 1920s with the publication of his works Libra de poemas (1921) and Romancero gitano (1928). Although Lorca wrote Poema del cante jondo in 1921, the collection was not published until 1931. Lorca’s best-known volume of poetry, Poet in New York, which reflected his time in depression-era New York City, was published after his death in 1940. At the onset of the Spanish Civil War, in August of 1936, the outspoken Lorca was arrested, executed without trial by Franco nationalists, and buried in an unmarked grave at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Ralph Angel is the author of four books of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; Twice Removed; and Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986 2006; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song.

His poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association.

Mr. Angel is Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.