Mr. Menes was born in Lima, Peru, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in Florida. He also spent two years in Spain during the early 70s. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English from the University of Florida. In 1998 he received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Starting in the Fall of 1999, he will be an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton in Ohio. His poems and translations have appeared in such literary magazines as Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Chelsea, Callaloo, The Americas Review, the Indiana Review, the Notre Dame Review, The Caribbean Writer, and the Seneca Review. For two years he was an assistant editor for Rio, an on-line literary and arts magazine. Mr. Menes’s first collection, Borderlands with Angels, won the 1994 Bacchae Press Chapbook Contest. Other recognition includes being nominated for the Pushcart Prize and winning the Charles Goodnow Award in Creative Writing from the Chicago Bar Association. In 1999, Mr. Menes was a finalist in the University of Illinois Press Poetry Series, in addition to being a semifinalist in two major contests: the Brittingham/Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry (1997) and the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry (1998). His second collection, Rumba atop the Stones, will be published in 2000 by Peepal Tree Press (Leeds, England).