Miguel Piñero was born in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, and when he was four, immigrated with his parents to New York. His father abandoned the family in 1954 and his mother moved into a basement and lived off of welfare. His first of what would be many criminal convictions was at the age of eleven, for theft. He was sent to the Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx. Piñero joined a street gang called "The Dragons" when he was 13 and when he was 14 he was hustling in the streets. Before Piñero had reached his 20 birthday, he was a drug addict with a long criminal record.
In 1972, when Piñero was 25 years old, he was incarcerated in Sing Sing prison for second-degree armed robbery. While serving time in prison, he wrote the play Short Eyes as part of the inmates playwriting workshop. The play is a drama based on his experiences in prison and portrays life, love and death among prison inmates. In 1974, the play was presented at Riverside Church in Manhattan. Theater impresario Joseph Papp saw the play and was so impressed that he moved the production to the Public Theater and then to Broadway, where it was nominated for six Tony Awards. It catapulted Piñero to literary fame. Short Eyes was published in book form by the editorial house Hill & Wang.
Once out of prison, Piñero continued to write. He landed appearances on TV shows Miami Vice and Baretta, where he wrote some scenes and consulted on real dialogue. He also received some small film roles, most notably in the Paul Newman police drama Fort Apache the Bronx. In the 1970s, Piñero co-founded the Nuyorican ("New York-Puerto Rican") Poets Cafe with a group of artists, including Miguel Algarín and Lucky Cienfuegos, would become his best friends. The Café was a place for performance of poetry about the experience of being a Puerto Rican in New York. It is now a universal location for poetry, music, and theater. Piñero was also recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Miguel Piñero died on June 17, 1988 in New York City from cirrhosis. In a case of life imitating art, Piñero's ashes were scattered across the Lower East Side of Manhattan, as he asked in his 1985 "Lower East Side Poem." The homage to his beloved neighborhood concluded:
"so please when I die ...
don't take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side ..."
Arlene Gottfried was born in Brooklyn and graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She has freelanced for top publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, and The Independent in London. Gottfried has also exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and Tokyo and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., among others. Her photographs can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Berenice Abbott International Competition of Women's Documentary Photography. Gottfried is the author of Midnight and Sometimes Overwhelming (powerHouse Books, 2003 and 2008), and The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999). Gottried lives and works in New York City.
