Nick Carbó

• Artist Relief Grant $5,000 (2020)

• Academy of American Poets Emergency Fund $4,000 (2019)

• Authors League Fund $16,000 (2017), $6,000 (2019)

Carbó married fellow American poet Denise Duhamel on August 22, 1992, at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, where he was serving as the Stadler Resident Poet. Both worked for anti-censorship causes as a result of having their works banned. In 2008, the couple divorced.

In the fall of 1984, Carbó moved to the United States to attend Bennington College, and he began to write poetry that Carbó calls "silly love poetry that rhymes a lot." He was impressed by the famous writers that taught at Bennington like W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, and Bernard Malamud. While there he took classes from noted scholar Jose Hernan Cordova who exposed him to important Latin American writers Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, and Jose Lezama Lima. During that period at Bennington College writers were getting published or signed by New York literary agents even before they graduated like Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. That was where Carbo forged a life-long friendship with Vietnamese writer Jade Ngoc Huynh, author of South Wind Changing. In 1985 he moved to San Antonio, Texas and he finally graduated from St. Mary's University where he helped to establish the Pecan Grove Poets. That group would go on to become the Pecan Grove Press. In 1990 he was accepted into the Masters of Fine Arts Poetry Program at Sarah Lawrence College. He studied under the poets Brooks Haxton, Thomas Lux, and Jean Valentine.

Nick Carbó (born 1964) is a Filipino-American writer from Legazpi, Albay, Philippines. Carbó writes poetry, essays, and edits magazines and anthologies. He is primarily known for his book of poetry titled Secret Asian Man (2000) Tia Chucha Press which won the Asian American Writers Workshop's Readers Choice Award. He also won the 2005 Calatagan Award from the Philippine American Writers & Artists for his book Andalusian Dawn (2004) Cherry Grove Collections. His most noted award is the 1999 Gregory Millard/New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

His work in collecting Filipino-American poetry into anthologies has set foundation for a Filipino-American literary culture to build off the rudimentary literary tradition of its mother country. There are not strong fundamentals for a literary tradition in the Philippines; in his 1961 lecture at Yale University "Philippine Literature: A Two-Fold Renaissance", Miguel Bernad contended that Philippine literature as an "inchoate literature of many languages." With 175 indigenous languages and both Spanish and American imperialism giving them new languages, Philippine authors split their readerships when choosing which language to write in. Carbó's conscious decision to amass Filipino-American writers into his anthology Returning A Borrowed Tongue intended to base Filipino-American literature in the English language to keep their audience whole, which literary critics such as Al Camus Palomar appreciate. The anthology includes poetry that recounts symbols of Filipino and Filipino-American life, such as jeepneys and cuisine, and use them as vehicles to convey the issues of their united identity. Palomar comments that the poets, who range from the early 1900s to 1990, are masters of English nuance and idioms and the volume as a whole being a stylish testament to Filipino poetry. Not all reviewers appreciated the focus on English, however; Roger J. Jiang Bresnahan opposed the decision, claiming it bred disunity by ignoring their common Philippine culture.

His father was a major influence in Carbó's decision to become a writer and poet. Carbó's father was well connected to Philippine literature, as he was college friends with Philippine literary giant Raphael Zulueta y da Costa, whose book Like the Molave and Other Poems won the Commonwealth Literary Prize in 1940. He was also friends with the legendary short story writer Bienvenido N. Santos who used to play tennis in their house in Legazpi. His father often interrupted his television time to quiz him on classic literature and read poetry. Between ages 7 and 10, Carbó's father would cajole him to recite Philippine national hero José Rizal's "Mi Ultimo Adios" at large dinner parties, instilling in him an interest in classic literature.