Luis Pales Matos (1898-1959) was born to a family of writers and poets in Guayama, Puerto Rico. His Tuntun de Pasa y Griferia received the first Instituto de Literatura Puertorriquena. The University of Puerto Rico recently published a critical collected edition of his work, La poesia de Luis Pales Matos.
Julio Marzan, distinguished Visiting Professor of Languages and Cultures at William Paterson University, is the author of The Numinous Site: The Poetry of Luis Pales Matos and The Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams, among other works. He also edited Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry and was chief consultant for the National Public Radio series Faces, Mirrors, Masks: Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction.