Rigoberto González was born in Bakersfield, California, and raised in Michoacán, Mexico. Educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Davis, and at Arizona State University, he received a University Award from the Academy of American Poets. His first collection of poetry, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, was selected for the 1998 National Poetry Series. He received the John Guyon Prize for Literary Nonfiction from The Crab Orchard Review, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, and an NEA fellowship. His novel Crossing Vines was named Fiction Book of the Year and received the Editor's Choice Award from ForeWord Magazine.

About Other Fugitives and Other Strangers:

"While the tension that never leaves these poems is, on the surface, erotic, what lies beneath the sensual energy is an awareness that sex, as the articulation of love, is tainted by our notions of how pure love should be. It's González's lyricism that joins the physical and the ideal, and demonstrates that the impulse to speak is a form of the impulse to touch. González's honesty is itself a kind of poetry: there is an exacting focus here that speaks of hope without using the word. If we can look, we can change. These are poems of transformation."
—Bob Hicok

"Follow Rigoberto González into these poems and you'll come to a place where a kiss is a fig or a rock, where a fist is a rose, or a finger is a barb on a hook. Inside this dazzling kaleidoscope of words, González whirls us through the delights and terrors of erotic love, and into the forbidden, hidden, dangerous body of desire. He was brave enough to write these unflinching, brilliant poems. Are you brave enough to read them?"
—Minnie Bruce Pratt