Biography
Clemente Soto Vélez was a major Puerto Rican poet and co-founder of the avant-garde "Atalaya de los Dioses" movement who became a militant organizer in the Nationalist Party. Convicted in the 1936 federal seditious-conspiracy case after the Riggs assassination, he was sentenced to seven years and imprisoned at the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Released in 1940, he was quickly re-jailed for violating parole with pro-independence speeches and finished his term at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, gaining release in 1942. He spent much of his later life in New York City, where he mentored generations of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican writers until his death in 1993.
