Ricardo Cortez Cruz was born in Decatur, Illinois. During high school and college he worked as a sports intern and newsroom clerk for the Decatur Herald and Review and as a sports clerk/writer for the Bloomington Pantagraph. He holds a master’s degree in writing from Illinois State University, where he was awarded the 1987–1988 Robert Brome Creative Writing Award, and is currently completing his doctorate there. His fiction has been published in Black Ice magazine, and a story is forthcoming in Fiction International. His hobbies include stereo mixing and basketball. He is currently living large in Bloomington, Illinois

“Ricardo Cortez Cruz’s novel Straight Outta Compton is a linguistic breakdance, a colloquial jitterbug, a slangy flashdance, full of risks that pay off with harsh delight. It’s surreal at times, a nightmare in broad daylight with a lot of possessed and dispossessed characters, characters who talk out of two sides of their heads. These characters talk jive, they lust and scream, laugh and shout; most of all they stay in motion, living hard and fast in the moment, moment after moment. They are whirled together in wonderment and anger. There’s courage here. Boldness. Life lived at the speed of television light and noise. And there’s rock hard authority. The confident, angry voice of the author lends them their anger. And who can say that this anger is unjustified in the streets of South Central L.A., or in this novel, that is not itself a kind of passionate expression of the quest for love?”
—Clarence Major, author of My Amputations, Winner of The 1986 Western States Book Award
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“As we move into the nineties, rap music’s slice-and-dice (and then bring-the-noize) approach has been this country’s most effective and original strategy for providing outsiders with a sense of the urgency, anger, and sheer exhilaration produced by the collisions of sounds, sights, and people in our urban jungles. Now in Straight Outta Compton, Ricardo Cruz has succeeded in writing the first major rap novel. It’s a brutal, authentic, and often startling book brimming over with the surrealism and black humor, exotic lyricism, and struttin’ intensity of our ghetto’s mean street scenes.”
—Larry Mccaffery, author of Storming the Reality Studio
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