Teobaldo Virgínio

Protestant pastor, poet, and fiction writer. His full name is Teobaldo Virgínio Assunção Nobre de Melo, and he is the brother of the writer Luís Romano. After having worked various manual professions while living in São Vicente, at the age of thirty, he decided to complete secondary school, and then, for three years, attended the Nazarene Seminary to dedicate himself to evangelical pastoral activity. It was in this capacity that, in the second half of the sixties, he lived in Luanda, later moving to the United States, where he settled even before Angola's independence. As a poet, he debuted in 1957, collaborating in the bulletin Cabo Verde, from Cidade da Praia. Three years later, he published his first book, Poemas Cabo-Verdianos (1960). In addition to collaborating in Cabo Verde and Claridade, from his archipelago, he has poetry and prose scattered across the literary supplement of A Capital, Lisbon, Notícias do Imbondeiro, Sá da Bandeira, Angola, and Coluna Norte and Morabeza, from Brazil. He is represented in the anthologies: Makua 2: Antologia Poética, by Leonel Cosme (Sá da Bandeira, 1966); Contos 66, by Leonel Cosme (Sá da Bandeira, 1966); Contos Portugueses do Ultramar, vol. 1, by Amândio César (Porto, 1969); Literatura Ultramarina: Os Prosadores, by Amândio César (Lisboa, 1972); No Reino de Caliban, vol. 1, by Manuel Ferreira (Lisboa, 1975), and Poèziia Bor'by [The Poetry of Struggle], by Helena A. Riáuzova (Moscow, 1976).