Daniel Borzutzky

Daniel Borzutzky is a Chicago-based poet and translator. His collection The Performance of Becoming Human won the 2016 National Book Award.[4] The son of Chilean immigrants, Borzutzky's work often addresses immigration, worker exploitation, political corruption, and economic disparity.[5]

He received a BA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.[6]

Borzutzky has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.[7] He is an Associate Professor of English and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[8]

His 2018 collection Lake Michigan was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. In 2021 he published Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, which was reviewed in The New Yorker and was a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Poetry Award. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy; Memories of my Overdevelopment; and The Book of Interfering Bodies.

Alongside his writing, Borzutzky is also known for his work as a translator. He received the 2017 American Literary Translators Association National Translation Award for his translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (Co-im-press, 2016) and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) by the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita.[9]