Peter Bjarkman

Peter C. Bjarkman

• School University of Hartford

• Born May 19, 1941 in Hartford, CT USA
• Died October 1, 2018 in Havana, Cuba

Biographical Information

Peter C. Bjarkman is the author of numerous baseball books, including the authoritative A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (2007). He wrote Baseball with a Latin Beat (1994), Diamonds Around the Globe (2005), Cuba's Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story (2016) and numerous other titles. He was considered one of the leading experts on Cuban baseball, especially on the Cuban National Series and Cuban national team after the 1959 Castro revolution. Bjarkman wrote regularly for www.BaseballdeCuba.com, the leading website on contemporary Cuban baseball.

After graduating from college, he stayed in Hartford, CT to teach high school English, then got the travel bug, getting jobs teaching English in Ecuador and Colombia. He learned Spanish and eventually earned a doctorate in linguistics, specializing in Cuban Spanish. He taught at various universities, including George Mason University, Ball State University, the University of Colorado and Purdue University. His wife, Ronnie Wilbur, is a professor of linguistics at Purdue and the couple resided in West Lafayette, IN. He died during a visit to Cuba in 2018.

However, in parallel with this distinguished academic career, he began dabbling in writing about baseball, from his unique perspective of being an expert on Latin American language and culture.

He was honored with the Henry Chadwick Award in 2017.

Further Reading

• John Thorn: "Peter Bjarkman (1941-)", Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 46, Nr. 1 (Spring 2017), p. 102.

Related Sites

• Official website