Carlos Luis "Charlie" Vázquez (born May 14, 1971) is a self-identified queer American artist, writer, and musician of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent and a New York Foundation For The Arts and NEA Fellow for poetry.
His family then moved north, to the Fordham neighborhood, where he became fascinated by a small white cottage in a nearby park that was poet Edgar Allan Poe’s final home.
Inspired by the writings of Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs, the novel follows the passionate and dysfunctional relationship from Portland, Oregon, where they meet, to New York City, where the story ends, by way of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert and Phoenix, Arizona.
The “intoxicated work of transient fiction” was inspired by his youthful years on the West Coast, where he experimented with drugs, sexuality, recorded experimental music and traveled throughout the Western United States and Vancouver, British Columbia.
His second novel, Contraband (2010, Rebel Satori Press) superimposes a 1959 Cuban Revolution-styled technological overhaul of government onto the United States of the near future, where intellectuals, queers and artists are sought and executed by a faceless dictatorship.
[7] The book Hustler Rave XXX: Poetry of the Eternal Survivor (2013), is a collection of poems about gay male prostitution written by Vázquez and David Caleb-Acevedo.
Vázquez cites Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Serge Gainsbourg, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Celia Cruz, Arsenio Rodríguez, Celina y Reutilio, Diamanda Galás and Joy Division as cultural influences.
Starting in 2016, novelist Álvaro Enrigue, and writers Vázquez and Lisa Ko founded and led PEN America's DREAMing Out Loud workshops.