Jack Agüeros

Jack Agüeros (1934 –2014) was an American community activist, poet, writer, and translator, and the former director of El Museo del Barrio.

After serving for four years in the United States Air Force as a guided missile instructor, he attended Brooklyn College on the G.I. Bill, intending to become an engineer. Inspired by Bernard Grebanier, a charismatic professor of English, and his lectures on Shakespeare, Agüeros began writing plays and poems, and instead graduated with a B.A. in English literature and a minor in speech and theatre.

Two of Agüeros's poems were included in one of the first anthologies of Puerto Rican literature, Borinquen, edited by Maria Teresa Babin and Stan Steiner, which was published by Knopf in December 1974. The two poems, "Canción del Tecato" and "El Apatético", are both in Spanish and appear in the section "Where am I at? The Youth," which also includes Pedro Pietri's well-known poem "Puerto Rican Obituary".