Robert Lima

ROBERT LIMA, award-winning poet, critic, bibliographer, playwright, biographer, and translator, is Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Comparative Literatures at The Pennsylvania State University, as well as Fellow Emeritus of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. He was a Senior Fulbright Fellow to Perú and a Cintas Fellow in Poetry. From 2001 to 2012, he served as president of the Central PA Fulbright Association. He is an Academician of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española and a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia Española. He has been honored as a Distinguished Alumnus by Villanova University, inducted into the Enxebre Orden da Vieira in Spain, initiated as a Fon into the Menda-Nkwe nation of Cameroun, and dubbed Knight Commander in the Order of Queen Isabel of Spain by His Majesty King Juan Carlos I. In 2017, he was bestowed the rank of Knight Commander in the Imperial Hispanic Order of Charles V by Enrique de Borbon, Gran Mestre of the Order, at the Alcazar in Segovia, Spain.

Among his books are The Theatre of García Lorca; Ramón del Valle-Inclán; An Annotated Bibliography of Valle-Inclán; Dos ensayos sobre teatro español de los veinte; and Valle-Inclán. The Theatre of His Life. He has translated Valle-Inclán's aesthetico-mystical treatise The Lamp of Marvels and his selection of short dramas Savage Acts: Four Plays. He selected for publication, edited, and translated Barrenechea's Borges the Labyrinth Maker, the first critical study on Borges in English, as well as edited and contributed to Borges and the Esoteric, a special issue of Crítica Hispánica. He edited and contributed to a special issue of Cauda Pavonis on Leonora Carrington. He has published well over one hundred twenty-five articles in a variety of fields. His most recent books are Dark Prisms. Occultism in Hispanic Drama; Valle-Inclán. El teatro de su vida; Ramón del Valle-Inclán: An Annotated Bibliography; The Dramatic World of Valle-Inclán; Stages of Evil. Occultism in Western Theater and Drama; and The International Bibliography of Studies on the Life and Works of Ramón del Valle-Inclán. A Spanish translation of Dark Prisms (Prismas oscuras) was published in Madrid in 2010. Across the Spectrum. Hispanic Cultural Heritage appeared in 2019).

He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, among them: Fathoms (1981), The Olde Ground (1985), Mayaland (1992), Sardinia/Sardegna (2000), Tracking the Minotaur (2003),The Pointing Bone (2008), The Rites of Stone (2010), Self (2012), Celestials (2017), Elementals (2019), Writers on my Watch (2020), ODYSSEY (2021), and over 700 poems in journals, books, anthologies, e-journals, and broadsides in the U.S. and abroad.

In 1974 he created "Surrealism--A Celebration," a multi-faceted event in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Surrealist Movement. Included were theatre productions, music concerts, films, displays of rare publications, paintings, sculpture, jewelry and other objects, presentations by leading art historians, artists, and literary critics. And a Surrealist banquet. Elements of these events appeared in a special 1975 issue of Journal of General Education, which he edited.

He has been elected to membership in PEN International and the Poetry Society of America. From March through August 2004, Penn State University Libraries exhibited "The Poetic World of Robert Lima," a retrospective of his poetry career from 1955 to the then present. He has also exhibited his poetry with visuals at venues in Pittsburgh, Juniata and State College. His poem "Astrals" has won first prize in the Phi Kappa Phi poetry competition for 2009 and appears in the society's journal, Forum. Eleven of his poems were translated into Greek and published in 2020 in NOHMA Magazine.

His biography appears in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the East, Who's Who in American Education, World Who's Who of Authors, and other creative writing directories in the U.S. and abroad.

Homepage: http://www.personal.psu.edu/RXL2