(This highly praised collection explores the disparity bet...)
This highly praised collection explores the disparity between promises and reality, especially as seen from the vantage point of the Hispanic Americans from the time of Columbus to the present. Promesas: Geography of the Impossible is Gloria Vando’s long-awaited first book of poems, a reunion of some of the complex and fully realized works that have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.
(The poems in Gloria Vando's second collection craft a wor...)
The poems in Gloria Vando's second collection craft a world of shadows: the remnants of Europe in the wake of World War II, the Vietnam soldier haunted by the photograph of a child, and the blood tax exacted from Puerto Rican Americans during the Vietnam War. And through it all, the shadows are enhanced by the supposes: her daughter's encounter with death at the Museum of Natural History, the "untrodden route beckoning to us from the side of logic," and Vando's own musings on life and death.
Gloria Vando Hickok is an American editor, publisher, and poet. She is a founder of Helicon Nine Editions and a co-founder of The Writers Place.
Background
Gloria Vando Hickok was born on May 21, 1936, in New York, United States. She is a daughter of Erasmo Vando, a poet, and Anita Velez-Mitchell, a director, journalist, writer, and poet. Gloria Vando grew up in a family that revered literature: every aunt, uncle, cousin could recite major poems by heart. Her grandmother, with whom she lived as a child, regaled her with poems and stories. She was an avid reader and storyteller. As a child, Gloria Vando attended many Sunday afternoon recitals that featured Latino entertainers in a variety of art forms that included dance, operatic arias, string quartets, classical guitarists, and declamadores, who recited poetry and got standing ovations.
Education
In 1951-1956, Gloria Vando Hickok attended New York University, in 1953-1954 - the University of Amsterdam. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University) in 1975. She had a postgraduate study at Long Island University in 1982-1983.
In 1969-1970, Gloria Vando Hickok worked as an educational ombudsman at Mayor's Special School Task Force, New York. In 1977-1979, she was an educational consultant at the Youth Diversion project, Mayor's Office, Kansas City, Missouri. In 1977, Vando Hickok became a publisher and editor at Helicon Nine Editions, a non-profit literary press in Kansas City, Missouri which she founded. For ten years, Helicon Nine Editions published a national literary magazine Helicon Nine: The Journal of Women's Arts & Letters. Helicon Nine Editions also sponsored the Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the Willa Cather Fiction Prize for fifteen years. In 1996, she became a contributing editor at North American Review, Cedar Falls, Iowa. In 1992, she and her husband, William Hickok, co-founded The Writers Place, a literary community center in Kansas City, Missouri.
Gloria Vando Hickok has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous state arts councils, and as a judge for the National Book Series Awards, held residencies in schools through Young Audiences and Arts Partners. She is on the advisory boards of BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City) and The Writers Place and has served as Arts Committee Chair for the Clearinghouse for Midcontinent Foundations, on the Board of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), and on the Kansas Governor's Council on the Arts. She is a contributing editor of The North American Review.
Gloria Vando Hickok writes in Spanish and English. She published her first poetry collection. Promesas: Geography of the Impossible, in 1993. Through childhood memories of her Puerto Rican family, explorations of historical events, and discussions of contemporary topics, Vando claims her joint legacy, both American and Puerto Rican. Her next book, Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems - To Benefit Hunger Relief, may seem somewhat lighter in tone, but there is a seriousness of purpose. With her co-editor Robert Stewart, she collected various poets' odes to the humble potato, a food that has actually staved off starvation in two world wars and other times of stress among European populations. A wide-ranging series of poems, topics include impressions of different cities, poetic odes to various artists and writers, and small dramas, such as a boy lost in the Museum of Natural History or a Black-shirt trying to seduce a blonde Jewish.
As a poet, Gloria Vando has edited and published numerous anthologies of poetry and received awards for her own books. Vando's book of poems, Shadows and Supposes won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and was named the Best Poetry Book of 2003 by the Latino Hall of Fame. Her first book of poems, Promesas: Geography of the Impossible was a Walt Whitman finalist and won the 1994 Thorpe Menn Book Award. Other awards include a River Styx International Poetry Prize; two Billee Murray Denny Poetry Prizes; the first Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship in poetry; Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant; and CCLM Editors Grant. Her work is in magazines, texts, anthologies, has been adapted for the stage and presented at Lincoln Center and Off-Broadway, and is on the 2007 Grammy-nominated Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work 1888-2006.
Community of Literary Magazines and Presses
,
United States
Missouri Citizens for the Arts
,
United States
PEN International
Interests
photography, painting
Writers
T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare
Connections
Gloria Vando married Maurice Peress on July 2, 1955. They divorced in September 1980. She married William H. Hickok on October 4, 1980. Gloria Vando has three children: Lorca, Paul, and Anika.
Father:
Erasmo Vando
Mother:
Anita Velez-Mitchell
Born in Vieques, Puerto Rico to an Austrian mother, Lucila Rieckehoff, in 1916, Anita Velez-Mitchell came to New York in 1929 and started on a long and illustrious career. From her days serving as a movie house usherette and as an extra in the Carlos Gardel's American films to her roles in TV commercials and her dancing, acting, and directing jobs, as well and composing music and writing, she conquered the public with her efforts, talent, and charismatic persona.
Throughout her career, she worked with some of the brightest names in show business. In the early 1950s, she commissioned musician Tito Puente to write a mambo for her San Juan Caribe Hilton debut with her own Anita Velez Dancers. The result was the Mambo-Ma-Coco. She later worked with the illustrious director George Abbott, the actor, choreographer, director, and producer Herbert Ross and famed bandleader Xavier Cougat. In her varied career, she also performed for the Ringling Brothers Circus, did some vaudeville, and worked with Columbia Concert Tours.
Anita Velez-Mitchell has said the character of Anita in West Side Story was actually named for her, but when she and her friend Chita Rivera went to the auditions, Rivera got the role. Velez-Mitchell did end up getting her chance to play the part later on with a touring company and returned to West Side Story in 1972 as a dance coach in the Lincoln Center revival.
Her thirst for creative outlets led her to write, produce, and direct numerous plays as well as write stories, poetry, and essays. As a freelance journalist, she interviewed personalities such as Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, French mime Marcel Marceau, Spanish painter Salvador Dali, poet Pablo Neruda, and Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. Anita Velez-Mitchell has also contributed to and supported many local organizations and institutions that promote and preserve her national cultural heritage, including La Casa de la Herencia Puertorriqueña, Instituto de Puerto Rico, and the Association of Puerto Rican Writers.
William Hickok, a first cousin several times removed from the gunslinger "Wild Bill" Hickok, was born in Kansas City; he graduated from Southwest High School and the University of Missouri. In 1951-1955, Hickok served as a lieutenant in the United States Marines. When he returned to the Kansas City area, he joined his brother, Jack, in the family business, building homes and apartment complexes in Johnson County, Kansas. Retirement in 1989 led to a focus on charitable activities, including the arts. In 1992, William Hickok and his wife Gloria Vando founded The Writers Place in a three-story limestone mansion at 36th and Pennsylvania in Midtown Kansas City.
Ex-husband:
Maurice Peress
Sister:
Jane Velez-Mitchell
Jane Velez-Mitchell is the founder and content editor of JaneUnChained, a multi-platform social media news outlet that produces original video content on animal rights and the vegan/compassionate lifestyle. She has won four Genesis Awards from the Humane Society of the United States for her reporting on animal issues. VegNews named Velez-Mitchell Media Maven of the Year in 2010. In 2013, Mercy for Animals awarded her their Compassionate Leadership Award. In 2014, she was honored for fighting animal abuse by the Animal Legal Defense Fund. In 2015, she received the Nanci Alexander Award at PETA's 35th anniversary.
For six years she hosted her own show on CNN Headline News, where she ran a weekly segment on animal issues. Previously, Velez-Mitchell reported for the nationally syndicated Warner Brothers/Telepictures show Celebrity Justice, where she did numerous stories on animal issues championed by celebrities. Previously, Velez-Mitchell was a news anchor/reporter at KCAL-TV in Los Angeles and WCBS-TV in New York. She is the winner of a Los Angeles Emmy and a New York Emmy for her reporting.
Jane Velez-Mitchell is the author of four books. Her 2014 nonfiction New York Times bestseller, Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias offers a detailed psychological analysis of a salacious trial that gripped the American public. Her other New York Times bestseller is her memoir, iWant: My Journey from Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life. Secrets Can Be Murder delves into the secrecy and deceit embedded in tragic scenarios. Addict Nation: An Intervention for America with co-author Sandra Mohr focuses on our culture's addictive nature and our obsession with overconsumption.
