Miguel Piñero (December 19, 1946 – June 16, 1988) was a Puerto Rican born American playwright, actor and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café.

In 1950, when Miguel was four, he moved with his parents and sister Elizabeth to Loisaida (or Lower East Side) in New York City.

After his second stint at Rikers, his mother sent him to Manhattan State Hospital, where he would receive his high-school equivalency diploma.

Marvin Felix Camillo, the director of The Family, an acting troupe made up of ex-cons, submitted the poem to a contest, which it won.

While serving time in prison, Piñero wrote the play Short Eyes as part of the inmates' playwriting workshop.

Mel Gussow came to see it, and due to his review in The New York Times, the director of the Theater at Riverside Church wanted Piñero to present it there.

[2] In the 1970s, Piñero co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café with a group of artists including Pedro Pietri and Miguel Algarín, who would become his closest friends.

In subsequent years, Piñero would land supporting roles in such films as The Jericho Mile (1979), Times Square (1980), Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), Breathless (1983), Deal of the Century (1983), and Alphabet City (1984).

In that same year was The Sun Always Shines for the Cool (1976) which follows the lives of players, operators, drug dealers, and thieves as they come together in a bar owned by a man named Justice.

The former is set in a subway men's room and involves a series of events framed by the voice of a man asking for toilet paper from inside a stall.

The homage to his beloved neighborhood concluded: I want to climb up on a tenement sky to dream my lungs out till I cry then scatter my ashes thru Leading up to his death, he was working with Papp on a new play to premiere at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Typescripts for Piñero's The Guntower and All Junkies are in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

In the film, Piñero's love life is displayed, ranging from his interactions with men and women, including his protégé Reinaldo Povod.

The relationships are secondary to the life of the writer as an individual, as the movie shows a non-chronological portrayal of Piñero's development as both a poet and a person.