Charles Cutler of Hawley first became fascinated by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in the early 1960s when Cutler was in Lisbon on a Fulbright Scholarship. Pessoa turned into one of his favorite writers to teach as a professor at Smith College for more than 40 years.

Now Pessoa is the subject of a book of poetry, and some prose, Cutler has co-edited with former Pioneer Valley poet Dan Mahoney.

“In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa” (MadHat Press, 386 pages, $23.95) will be launched today (Saturday, Feb. 1) at 6 p.m. at Raven Used Books on Conway Street in Shelburne Falls.

The book features some 200 works by American poets and writers who have been inspired by Fernando Pessoa. According to Cutler, he and his co-editors received over 1,000 submissions.

I had never heard of Pessoa before learning of this book. The writer, who lived from 1888 to 1935, was apparently little known outside of Portuguese literary circles in his lifetime.

In the decades since his death, however, his fame and appeal have grown to such an extent that he is now regarded as a phenomenon both at home and abroad.

“He’s such a cult figure,” Cutler said of Pessoa in a recent interview. “Everybody’s reading him. Everybody’s translating him.”

Pessoa is perhaps best known for creating and writing under a multitude of heteronyms. These are not mere pseudonyms, alternate names used in writing, but rather alternate identities. Pessoa adopted 70 to 80 different personas in his writing, all of whom had distinct life stories and literary traits.

In those long ago days in Lisbon, Charles Cutler’s discovery of Pessoa came when he read poetry by one of the author’s best known heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos. The poetry revolved around another of Cutler’s favorite poets, Walt Whitman.

Cutler had been reading Whitman a lot while in Lisbon, he told me. “It was nostalgia for home, but it was also an antidote to what was going on around me,” he noted. During that sojourn in Portugal, the country was still under the thumb of its long-time anti-democratic dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Reading Whitman led to reading Álvaro de Campos’s take on Whitman. Cutler went to a bookstore to ask for more works by that author, only to have the bookseller pull him aside and gently explain that the poet was “a fabrication of Pessoa.” Cutler started reading Pessoa. He has never looked back.

One of Cutler’s favorite (and he believes most meaningful) assignments as a teacher of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith involved asking students to invent their own heteronyms.

They would write poems in Spanish or Portuguese in their heteronyms’ voices, translate the poems into English, and describe the choices they had made.

The process of adopting heteronyms, Cutler explained, enables the writer to erase his or her identity to make room for more. At a time of maximum exposure in all our lives, erasure can even be a way of protecting privacy, he maintains.

“People say [of Pessoa], ‘He must have been a crackpot.’ My response to that is that we all have other selves,” Cutler said.

He gave as an example the character of Terry Malloy, the former prizefighter played by Marlon Brando in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront.” In what is probably the movie’s best known scene, Terry tells his brother, “I could’a been a contender. I could’a been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

“We all have lives that didn’t happen and lives that do. The lives that don’t work out we carry around with us,” mused Cutler. “I think we all live between the life we have and the lives that we imagine.”

Having just watched the film “A Complete Unknown,” about Bob Dylan, Cutler suggested that Dylan was another good example of “stripping one person to become another.”

“I’ve had dreams about Dylan and Pessoa getting together,” he laughed. Cutler sees “In the Footsteps of a Shadow” as a departure from previous works about Pessoa. For one thing, it features reactions to the poet rather than his own poetry.

More importantly, it is aimed at a general American poetry-loving public rather than to the somewhat restricted world of Pessoa studies in academia, or even to just those who have already encountered Pessoa or any of his alternate identities.

I was impressed and tickled by the humor displayed in many of the book’s poems. Cutler said he welcomed the lighter touch of many of the submissions.

“For so long Pessoa scholarship was always very serious, existentialist stuff. But he had a really bizarre sense of humor,” he explained. “More than a few of the contributors submitted funny takes on him.”

Cutler cited the poem “I Am Not a Keeper of Sheep” by Frank Gaspar. Gaspar writes of letting Fernando Pessoa into his home and soul … and then being unable to get rid of him.

“He sits so unassumingly at the table and you give him a small drink, and he begins to speak to you, and then you realize your day is ruined, your plans will come to nothing, you will end by trying every subterfuge you know to get him to leave, but he will wait and wait,” writes Gaspar of Pessoa. “And he is so charming!”

The book includes other well-known poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Kay Ryan, Tony Hoagland and Billy Collins. It also features a number of writers connected to western Massachusetts: Amy Dryansky, Daniel Hales, Ellen Watson and (co-editor) Dan Mahoney.

The event at Raven Books will include talks by the book’s editors and poetry recitations from several of the poets involved. Light refreshments will be served.

For more information, call the bookstore at 413-522-2868.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com