José Kozer (born Havana, 1940) is the son of parents who migrated to Cuba from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and the grandson of a founder of Adath Israel, Cuba's first Ashkenazi synagogue. He studied law at the University of Havana, left Cuba in 1960, and received a BA from New York University in 1965. He taught for many years at Queens College of the City University of New York, retiring as a full professor in 1997, after which he lived for two years in Spain before settling in South Florida. Regarded as the leading Cuban poet of his generation, he is the author of 63 poetry collections, including TOKONOMA (Shearsman Books, 2014), ANIMA (Shearsman Books, 2011), and STET: SELECTED POEMS (Junction Press, 2006). In 2013 he was awarded the Pablo Neruda award by the Chilean government, one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world.