Ralph Angel
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Ralph Angel, poet translator, and visual artist, is a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent, was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1951. He worked freight trains for the Union Pacific Railroad while earning his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Washington. He then received a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Irvine.
In 2006, Angel published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection Poema del cante jondo [Poem of the Deep Song] with Sarabande Books, and the posthumously published essay collection A Day in the Life (Black Ocean, 2026). Angel’s other honors included a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation and the Poetry Foundation.
He went on to serve as the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, where he shaped the Creative Writing Department and taught for nearly four decades. He was also a beloved member of the writing faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.
Courtesy of Ralph Angel\’s personal website, Poetry Foundation, and poets.org
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
“I come from a household of three languages—Ladino, Hebrew, and English—one that I could understand but not speak, one that I could sing but not understand, and one that is the language of my country, at some distance, always, from my home,”he wrote in the \”Afterward\” to Poem of the Deep Song.
When he came to translate Lorca’s poetry, he noted that he was familiar with the music that the poems paid homage to: “It resembled the incantatory medieval singing of the Sephardic synagogue that I grew up in.”
Published Works
Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems (Sarabande Books, 2006)
Twice Removed (Sarabande Books, 2001)
Neither World (Miami University Press, 1995)
Anxious Latitudes (Wesleyan University Press, 1986)
Translation-
Poema del cante jondo/Poem of the Deep Song, Federico García Lorca (Sarabande Books, 2006)
Visual Art-
entropia (Dark Spring Press, 2019)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Education
University of Washington, Bachelor of Arts
University of California, Irvine, Master of Fine Arts