While watching a production of Rumpelstiltskin in sixth grade, José Rivera felt as if he had been physically conveyed to another world. Fantasy and transcendence mark all of Rivera's work. Reading such authors as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Gabriel García Márquez, Maya Angelou, and Vladimir Nabokov taught him that lyrical dialogue could lift an audience out of the everyday realm into an altered reality. Often this fanciful setting is another world; frequently it is the internal landscape of his characters projected outward. Rivera probes the heart of his characters' selves, not like a psychoanalyst, but rather like a persistent friend, prompting them to speak about the events in their lives that reveal who they are.

Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on 24 March 1955, the eldest of six children. His family lived in the small farming town of Espino until his father...