José Kozer

José Kozer is recognized in the Spanish-speaking world as the foremost Cuban poet of his generation and an inheritor of the neo-baroque tradition after José Lezama Lima. Kozer is author of 52 books of poetry and prose, and has lived in the U.S. since the 1960s.

Kozer’s poetry has been translated to English, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Hebrew and Greek, has been widely anthologized and has appeared in numerous literary journals from all over the world, and from publishers such as Gallimard (France) and Fischer Verlag (Germany), where only 15 poets of the Latin American 20th century appeared. A 1997 symposium on Kozer’s poetry, held at University of California, Irvine, produced a full-length book, La Voracidad Grafómana: José Kozer (UNAM University in Mexico City).

Born in Havana, Cuba, of Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland and Czechoslovakia, Kozer left his native land in 1960 and lived in New York until 1997, the year he retired from Queens College, where he taught Spanish and Latin American literatures for 32 years.