Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was born on Cape Verde's São Vicente Island. Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Fortes was Cape Verde's ambassador to both Portugal and Angola, and served as a judge in Angola. Writing in both Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, Fortes was as interested in poetic form and sonic possibility as he was in the cultural identity, history, and movements of the Cape Verdean archipelago. His first collection, Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year of the collapse of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which led to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Throughout his career Corsino Fortes's poems offer vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country - word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body.
