Carlos Javier Morales was born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife on September 7, 1967. He lived on his native island until he was seventeen years old, when he moved to Madrid to study COU and then a career in Hispanic Philology at the Complutense University. He obtained this Bachelor's Degree in 1990 and a Doctor's Degree in 1993, with a thesis entitled “The poetics of Martí and its context”, directed by Prof. Luis Sáinz de Medrano. During these years as a university student and postgraduate, he was part of various groups of literature and thought, some driven by his own initiative, such as a gathering held every Saturday at the Café Rey Fernando, on Prim Street, between 1992 and 1995, at the attended by numerous friends of poets and poetry readers. There they read and criticize, with total freedom, texts by other authors not present, which allows all the participants to create a solid and plural poetic criterion at the same time.
Great poets of the Castilian language pass through this gathering, on special occasions, such as José Hierro, Francisco Brines, Pablo Armando Fernández, Félix Grande, Luis Antonio de Villena, Luis García Montero, Pedro Shimose, etc. With some of them Carlos Javier will begin a long friendship. At this time of youth training, some friends were born that, due to his intimacy and the human and literary category of his friends, will decisively influence his career as a poet and as a critic.
From 1985 until his death in 1999, he frequented the home of Ernestina de Champourcin, who encouraged and advised him almost from the beginning of him as a poet. In 1992 he met the professor and critic José Olivio Jiménez, one of his closest friends until he died in 2003. Carlos Javier regularly visits José Olivio's house, on Agustín de Foxá street, and one of the most fervent poems of Madrid as delirium. With José Olivio he will also work on two research books and literary criticism. In 1993 he met and began to visit frequently, at his house on Antonio Acuña Street, the great Cuban poet, essayist and journalist Gastón Baquero, who transmitted to him his rich and lucid experience as a writer and reader of all the literatures.
In 1994 he won the “Villa de Martorell” Poetry Prize with his first book, El pan más necesario, published by Seuba Ediciones in September of that same year. In 1995 Carlos Javier moved to Logroño to teach Spanish and Hispano-American Literature at the University of La Rioja. There he continues to work on his poetry and on his research and critical books. This is a time of international congresses and stays as visiting professor abroad. In this regard, it is worth highlighting his semester as visiting professor at the University of Münster (Germany), in the spring and summer of 1998, as well as his trip to Chile in 1999, representing Spain at the congress “The young poet and his book ”, Organized by the Nobel Prize Gabriela Mistral Foundation.
That year, 1999, he returned to Madrid to work as a professor at the San Pablo-CEU University. He remained there until 2002, in which, due to various work circumstances, he obtained by opposition the position of teacher of Spanish Language and Literature in secondary education. He is currently a professor of these subjects at the Andrés Bello Institute, in his hometown, a task that he makes compatible with his poetic creation and his critical and research works on contemporary poetry in Spain and Latin America, after a long career as a student of José Martí, Hispanic modernism and, in general, late-nineteenth-century literature in the Spanish language.
