Updates!!!

Gosh! It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. Lots has happened. I’ll just cover the major thingies and then some of the latest thingies.

Major

My craft chapbook, You MUST Use the Word Smoothie, is available for FREE download from Sundress Publications.

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I won a Pushcart Prize for my poem “four short essays personifying a future in which white supremacy has ended,” originally published by Foglifter (many thanks to the editors for nominating me!).

Latest

Bouquets of thanks to the DC Youth Slam Team for highlighting my poem, “Set the Garden on Fire” on their Twitter page, in honor of Immigrant Heritage Month. The poem’s the title poem from my first chapbook and was first published in Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week—archived here. And here’s the cool graphic (with an excerpt from the poem) that the DC Youth Slam Team posted.

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It is also, of course (!), Pride Month (!!!). Thanks to Sarah Neilson for including my book in “Reading the Rainbow: A Pride Reading List” over at LA Review of Books. Such a beautiful list! And I love this description for my collection. “A total thrill”~!

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This week (June 12th) marked the third anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. 49 people, many of them queer and Latinx, were killed in what was, at the time, the largest modern massacre in the United States. It was Latin night. People were dancing, laughing, sharing stories and themselves.

Here is an elegy I wrote in response to Pulse. This poem thinks about, among other things, queer desire and joy next to the constant threat of violence. I am immensely grateful to Julian Randall for publishing this last year as part of a “Lineage of Mirrors” feature on Winter Tangerine.