Poet Ralph Angel grew up, lives, and works on the U.S. West Coast, yet has traveled throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Angel is on faculty on both coasts, teaching creative writing classes. As a poet, Angel has won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright fellowship. The first book of poetry Angel published was Anxious Latitudes in 1986. Angel did not publish another book for almost ten years when he released Neither World. The "world" Angel introduces here is that of Los Angeles through surrealism. Gail Wronsky, writing in the Antioch Review, wrote that Neither World "is an exhilarating, heartbreaking, deliciously subversive place."

Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems, 1986-2006, published in 2006, is a collection of Angel's previous three collections, plus twenty-three new poems. Fred Muratori, writing in Library Journal, called Angel "a poet of the interior," adding that he "conjures a half-lit, Prufrockian world forever caught between states of dreaming and waking" in his poetry.

Source: Gale In Context: Biography