About

Aaron Angello grew up in and around the small, mountain town of Cripple Creek, Colorado. His mother raised horses, his father was a musician and entrepreneur. Aaron spent his childhood hanging out with the cowboys at the Western Theater (a tourist attraction his father owned in Cripple Creek where untrained stunt performers shot each other with black powder blanks and fell from the roofs of false-fronted buildings in a fake western town). At fourteen years old, he began playing guitar and harmonica in his father's band and spending most weekend nights on small stages in smoke-filled bars. 

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After a first, unsuccessful attempt at college, Aaron moved to New York City, studied acting at the Circle in the Square School of Theatre, and worked for a few years as an actor and director in various small, downtown theatres. Then, in a desperate attempt to sell out, he moved to Los Angeles, where he found occasional work as an actor, director, stunt performer, and fight choreographer in film and television. He also began working as an actor and teacher with a classical, repertory theatre company in Topanga Canyon. It was a deeply formative time for him, performing nightly in Shakespeare’s plays at one of the most ideally beautiful outdoor amphitheaters in the country. His immersion in Shakespeare’s language activated a lifelong love of and fascination with poetry and language. This new-found love of language led him to songwriting, and he began performing as a singer/songwriter in and around LA. He released a few albums and toured a bit while continuing to work in the theatre.  

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As he approached his thirties, he realized that he didn’t want to go through life as a college dropout, so he went back to school, this time to Antioch University. There, in the company of serious writers and poets, he began writing and studying poetry and literature in earnest. 

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After a brief stint running a bar on the beach in Costa Rica, he returned to Colorado to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Colorado. He liked it there, so he stayed until he ended up with a PhD in modern/contemporary poetry and digital media. 

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Currently, Aaron is a professor of English and theatre at Hood College, where he directs the theatre program and teaches courses in creative writing, modern and contemporary poetry, film and media, and drama. He is also creative director of the Endangered Species (theatre) Project and founder of the Frederick Shakespeare Festival. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, and he is the editor of The Synergistic Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting. His genre-defying book The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications will be published in April of 2022 by Rose Metal Press.