Associate Professor Orlando Ricardo Menes currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame. His third poetry collection, Fetish, won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2013.
He is also the author of Furia and Rumba atop the Stones. His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review.
In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008. Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni. He has also received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
His poetry delves into questions of liminality, the hybrid sacred, diaspora and exile, and the relationship between the cross-cultural imagination and a poetics of the baroque.