Orlando Ferrand

Orlando Ferrand was born on November 8, 1967, in Santigo de Cuba, Cuba, and moved in his late teens to the East Village in the island of Manhattan, New York. An award-winning poet, writer and multidisciplinary artist, he is a graduate of City College and Columbia University. He received the BRIO Award for Excellence in Poetry by the Bronx Council on the Arts in 2014. His memoir Apologia: Cuban Childhood in My Backpack, received a 5-stars rating by Readers’ Favorite in 2012, and was selected as the Book-of-the-Semester by Hostos Community College, CUNY, in the spring of 2012. Ferrand’s first collection of poetry, Citywalker, won the Gold Medal in the Readers’ Favorite Book Review and Award Contest in 2011. He also won the Linden Lane Press Poetry Prize in 2011 for his book La Otra Isla, (Spanish Edition). Mr. Ferrand has been a writer-in-residence at CUNY and Princeton University and has taught workshops as a teaching artist and Adjunct Professor at BCA, GMHC, Miami-Dade College, SUNY, CUNY, the University of La Laguna in Spain, and the University of Yucatán in Mérida, México. He has contributed to numerous anthologies and literary magazines. His opera libretto, Still Life with Daniel the Lonely Mutant and his plays, Requiem, Balad for Kangaroos, Narcissus 90 and The Other Island have been produced in the US, Europe, Mexico and the Caribbean. His work as a visual artist has been showcased in mainstream museums and art galleries such as the Leslie/Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Luhring Augustine, Jenkins & Co., and Cheim & Read in New York City. He is currently working on new collections of poetry, plays, essays and short stories. Orlando Ferrand lives in The Bronx, New York, with his Doberman Pinscher, Sookie, and Clio, the Maine Coon cat.