Daniel Borzutzky

Poet and translator, Daniel Borzutzky, was born 1974 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Chilean parents. He is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, which received the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry, and Lake Michigan, which was nominated for the 2018 Griffin Prize. Borzutzky writes in the tradition of activist, political poetry to examine state-sponsored violence, and the rhetoric of capitalism and bureaucracy that helps to sanction it. He is particularly interested in border and immigration politics. His influences include Pablo Neruda and Raúl Zurita, whose work he has translated from Spanish. Borzutzky lives in Chicago where he teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.