Carlos Aguasaco, Ph.D.

 Carlos Aguasaco was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1975. He earned his Ph.D.at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and was awarded the prestigious W. Burghardt Turner Doctoral Fellowship by the State University of New York. He holds a M.A. in Spanish from The City College of New York (CUNY) and B.A. in Literature from the National University of Colombia. Carlos is a writer whose poems have been published by the National University of Colombia. In New York, for four years, he worked as a high school teacher for the Board of Education of New York. Simultaneously, he worked as part time Spanish lecturer at the Center For Worker Education at the City College. He is a member of the editorial committee of "Hybrido Magazine." In the Fall 2002 The Simon H. Rifkind Center For The Humanities & The Arts granted him a Blanche Mason Starweather Student Award for his project "Four Discoveries of America in William Ospina's El pais del viento ." A sample of his work as poet and translator was included in Red Hot Salsa Bilingual Poem On Being Young And Latino In The United States (Henry Holt, 2005). His short stories have been included in anthologies such as Pequeñas Resistensias 4 Antología del nuevo cuento norteamericano y caribeño published in Spain (2005). He is the co-editor of a series of anthologies: Encuentro 10 poetas latinoamericanos en USA (2003), Narraciones sin Frontera 27 cuentistas hispanoamericanos (2004) and Ensayos sin frontera -Estudios sobre literatura hispanoamericana-(2005). Currently, he is the web master of www.artepoetica.com a website devoted to the promotion of poetry originally written in Spanish. His academic interest is the study of twentieth century Latin American popular culture and the residual practices it inherited from the Spanish Golden Age. In other words, he intends to read the influence that a picaresque novel like El Lazarillo de Tormes has had in the production and the reception of a transnational TV show like El Chavo del Ocho.