With Breathing Light (1991) the Chicago Chicano poet Raúl Niño positioned himself as a writer committed to exploring individual and cultural, as opposed to social and political, concerns. Perhaps the least public and least extroverted of the Mexican poets one could call "Chicano" in Chicago--a group that includes Chicano poets writing mainly in English, recent emigrants from Mexico, and, above all, the self-named Generacion mojada, or "Wetback Generation," writing in Spanish--he represents an important dimension of contemporary Chicago and national Chicano writing as it has developed from its more militant roots and uses in the 1960s.

Raúl Niño was born on 15 March 1961 in Monterrey, Mexico, and was raised in southern Texas. In the late 1960s he moved with his mother to the Chicago suburbs where he worked as a domestic.

He graduated from New Trier West High School in 1980. He attended...