José María Moreno Carrascal ([xoˈse maˈɾia moˈɾeno karasˈkal]; born 6 October 1951) is a Spanish poet, translator, and teacher.
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Early years
José María Moreno Carrascal was born in 1951 in Ayerbe (Aragón), [Spain] of Estramaduran parents. After living for three years in Cangas de Onís [Asturias], in 1956 his family relocated to Sanlúcar la Mayor [Andalucia, a region where his parents had lived for two decades]. He attended the local Catholic elementary schools in these two towns. In 1961 his family moved to Seville.
Education
During the 1960s he completed his secondary school education in the Instituto "San Isidoro" of the Andalusian capital. In the summer of 1967, he toured Morocco with a group of fellow students. The following year he lived and studied in East Aurora, New York, as he was granted a scholarship by American Field Service. In 1970 he began his undergraduate studies at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras in the University of Seville and started the first of a two-year study at the Seville Conservatory of Music and Drama. In 1972 he transferred to the University of Granada where he completed his degree in English Philology.
Career
After living in New Orleans (USA) for two years, he returned to the Spanish Andalusian towns of Arcos de la Frontera (where, for a period of three years, he worked at the local public secondary school as a Spanish Literature and English teacher) and Rota (where he worked as an English teacher until October 2011). He also had a chance, during the last years of his active career as an educator in Spain, to teach and coordinate adult education hybrid classes. He began to publish his literary transaltions and poems during the second half of the nineteen seventies and early eighties. In the academic year 1982-1983 he lived in London, England, teaching Spanish at The Prince Regent Comprehensive School. Back in Spain, during the school years 1984-1986, he took postgraduate courses in Spanish and English Literature and Literary Criticism at the University of Cádiz and, years later (1997–1999), at UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Madrid, where, in 2010, he defended his Doctoral Thesis entitled Self and Modernism: A study of the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, which obtained the qualification of summa cum laude and was awarded Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado. Moving back to the USA, he became an adjunct professor during the school year 2012-2013 in the Department of Romance Languages and the Augustine and Culture Seminar at Villanova University (Pennsylvania). In 2015 he, along with his wife and young son, moved south, to the state of Florida, where he is currently teaching English Composition and North-American and World Literature as an instructor for Southern State University, at CCA (Calvary Christian Academy), Ormond Beach, and Spanish language in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Stetson University, DeLand. He has also worked as an on- call language instructor for L-3 Communications in San Antonio, Texas, and Miami, Florida.
He has travelled extensively through Europe, Morocco, North America and Central America.
His translations and studies of English and American poets have been published in book form by different Spanish publishers (Renacimiento, Edinexus, Visor, Pre-Textos) as well as in literary and academic periodicals and magazines (Estafeta Literaria, Fin de Siglo, Clarín, Condados de Niebla, Revista Atlántica de Poesía, Demófilo,Isla de Siltolá, Atlantis, etc.), some of which have also included his own poetical works. In the year 2010 his book of poems Los Jardines de Hielo received an accesit in the International Poetry Award given by the Ecoem Foundation in Seville, Spain, and in 2012 his collection of poems "Los Reinos Diminutos" won the 27th Unicaja International Poetry Award.