Eleuterio Santiago-Díaz is a poet, professor, and literary critic. He is the author of the poetry book Breaths (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2012) and the monograph Escritura afropuertorriqueña y modernidad (Pittsburgh, PA: IILI/University of Pittsburgh, 2007). The ninth of ten children of a carpenter and a homemaker, he was born and raised in the rural southeastern coast of Patillas, Puerto Rico. Since an early age, he was exposed to poetry through school and community gatherings where diverse forms of artistic performance were a mainstay of communal life. Upon graduation from the University of Puerto Rico, he worked for seven years as a teacher of Spanish, physical education, and industrial arts, and as an elementary school librarian in Puerto Rican public schools. He earned a Master’s degree in Spanish from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. He currently is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The University of New Mexico.