The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature poet Orlando Ricardo Menes on Thursday, Jan. 22, at 7 p.m. in Winants Auditorium of Graves Hall.
He will be featured during a question-and-answer session earlier in the day, at 3:30 p.m. in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium in the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Peru, and immigrated to Miami, Florida, with his parents at the age of 10. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and pursued his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Menes is the author of the poetry collections “Fetish,” “Furia” and “Rumba atop the Stones,” and his collection “Heresies” is forthcoming this year. His poems have also appeared in several prominent anthologies and literary magazines. He received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for “Fetish” in 2012.
He is the editor of “Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred” and “The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008.” Menes has published translations of Spanish poetry, including “My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni.”
Since 2000, Menes has taught in the Creating Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he is an associate professor of English and a Fellow with the Institute for Latino Studies. He lives in northern Indiana.
Additional information is available online at jrvws.org.
Graves Hall is located at 263 College Ave., between 10th and 12th streets. The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street.