Poet Victor Hernandez Cruz will read from his work a t the Len Roberts Poetry Day on Thursday, April 10 at 11:00 a.m. in the David A. Reed Community Room of College Center, Northampton Community College (NCC), 3835 Green Pond Road , Bethlehem Township.

Born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico in 1949, Cruz arrived on New York’s Lower East Side when he was five. His grandfather’s storytelling and recitation of Spanish classics and folktales as well as his family’s love for Puerto Rico’s traditional music marks Cruz’s work, which fuses English and Spanish. “National languages melt, sail into each other,” he wrote in his 1991 book, Red Beans.

As a teenager, Cruz helped found the Nuyorican (New York-Puerto Rico) cultural movement of the 1960s. According to the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize Committee, he has “long been the defining poet of that complex bridge between the Latino and mainland cultures of the U.S.”

In addition to authoring numerous works of poetry and prose, Cruz has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Latin American Guggenheim Award and a New York Poetry Foundation Award. In 2002, he became a finalist for the international Griffin Poetry Prize.

NCC’s annual poetry day was started more than 25 years ago by Len Roberts, a nationally-known poet and the recipient of numerous awards for writing and teaching. It is now named for Roberts, a beloved professor of English at NCC from 1974 until his death in May 2007.

Admission to the Len Roberts Poetry Day is free and open to the public. For more information, call 610-861-5300.