Vincent Toro

Vincent Toro is a Manhattan, NY born Puerto Rican decent teacher, poet, playwright, and director. His poetry is focused on the experience of people who cross the US-Mexico border and Latin-American people in general.

Education Vincent Toro attended Rutgers University where he received an MFA in poetry.

Career In addition to writing and directing, Toro is an educator. Since 2001, he has taught in communities of color. He also spent this time writing about issues that are prevalent in these communities. From 2006 to 2011, Toro was Theater Arts Director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. He is a member of the Macondo Writer's Foundation and serves on the board of GlobalWrites, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy through integration of technology and performing arts in schools.

Latino contributions Motivation

Toro's experimentation in his poetry draws from afrofuturism, Italian futurism, and the Ultraísmo social and literary movements. Toro borrows ideas of liberation and linguistic boldness from these genres, and applies them in a Latinx context to redefine the Latino identity and experience.

Publications

Toro has written two books, Stereo.Island.Mosaic. and Tertulia. He has been featured in many journals, including Anomaly Literary Journal, BOAAT Journal, Kweli Journal, The Texas Review, The Buenos Aires Review, Paterson Literary Review, and San Antonio Express-News, and Duende Literary Journal. Toro's poems can also be found in the Cream City Review's 39th publication and his work is discussed in the Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures as well. Additional works in which his poems have been published include Rattapallax, Bordersenses, Really System, Five Quarterly, Codex, and The Waiting Room Reader 2. In “DREAMcatcher” he is critical of the limits that are put on the “illegal” human, especially those involved in the DREAM Act, which come about as rejections of the immigrants body and way of living. In “Sleep Dealer”, Toro focuses on the border crossing itself and the technological component of crossing a bridge between two worlds and the existence within one of those worlds with inspiration from Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer. Vincent Toro won the 2014 Poet's House Emerging Poet's Fellowship and the 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. During his tenure there, he won The San Antonio Theater Councils Golden Globe for Direction of a Drama for his staging of Suzan Lori Park's Topdog/Underdog.