Odi Gonzales was born in Cusco, Peru, in 1962. He simultaneously learned Quechua and Spanish. In Arequipa he completed his high school studies. At the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa he studied Industrial Engineering and Literature. Between 1990-2000 he was a university professor. Later he traveled to the USA on a scholarship to the University of Maryland, College Park where he did graduate studies in Latin American Literature, and was a professor of Quechua Language and Culture. In the United States he also worked as a Quechua translator and researcher for National Geographic Television, Smithsonian, National Museum of American Indian, and National Foreign Language Center in Washington DC. He currently lives in Cajamarca, Peru, where he is working on his doctoral thesis on Quechua Oral Tradition. He has published the following books of poems: Juego de niños, 1988; Valle Sagrado, 1993; Almas en pena, 1998; Tunupa/El libro de las sirenas, 2002; and La escuela de Cusco, 2005. In 1996, he published the book of essays El condenado o alma en pena en la tradición oral andina. In 1992 he received the National Poetry Prize "César Vallejo" from the newspaper El Comercio of Lima and in the same year the National Poetry Prize from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima. Bilingual and expert in Quechua Oral Tradition, he works on a singularly attractive theme: Andean fables, indigenous cosmogony and traditional routines. And he does it with a clean, dry stroke, whose effectiveness is made concrete thanks to the precise dosage of the voices of the narrator and the characters. His greatest contribution is to have incorporated into the poetic discourse voices coming from the Quechua orality, achieving a choral, polyphonic poetry, of diverse levels of language; a framework of voices that converge in each of his poems.
New Books:
Birds on the kiswar tree: poems (2014)
La Escuela de Cusco (2005)
