Editor’s note: Poets listed here may or may not identify under the terms “Latinx” or “Latine” due to a variety of reasons. Identity terms are always insufficient and can never come close to encompassing a community much less an individual. For this reason, I encourage you to read and learn from these poets, who bring much needed challenges to traditional ideas of “Latinidad,” as well as gender and sexuality.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ (They/Them)
Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous (Zapotec) poet, installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. In the past few years, Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez has become required reading in my Latinx literature classes. From their essay ““The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend” (2018), to their art exhibit ““N[eg]ation” at Harvard (2023), their call to “Latinidad is canceled” social media campaign, to their theoretical scholarship on “trans*imagination,” Pelaez Lopez is at the forefront of critiquing a field that has often been anti-Black, anti-indigenous and anti-queer. Their 2020 poetry book Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien is an intimate look at the development of that thinking through poetry that explores quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, while situating their poetics within a history of indigenous genocide and slavery. Pelaez Lopez also uses poetry to imagine alternative Black and Indigenous futures.
Recommended Text: Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien (2020)
Recommended Video
NATALIE DIAZ (She/Her)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave poet, Natalie Diaz, is likewise required reading to me for all intro to Latinx Literature or American Literature courses. Diaz’s poetics is an important reminder of a vibrant Indigenous present that has survived both Spanish and US enacted genocides as well as repeated attempts at cultural and historic erasures. Diaz explores the relationships in her life that have resulted from these colonized histories, whether to the land, to her family, to a lover or to her reader, developing a unique poetic language to describe that experience. In the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Postcolonial Love Poem, we enter a landscape with language like “"bloodstones" and "snakebite" that may feel unfamiliar, but in that unfamiliarity is Diaz’s fight against indigenous erasure.
Recommended Text: Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)
Recommended Video
EDUARDO CORRAL (He/Him)
Eduardo Corral burst onto the poetry scene with his debut collection, Slow Lightning, which was the recipient of the 2011 Yale Younger Series Poets award, making him the first Latinx recipient of this prize. More than a decade later, it’s still one of my favorite poetry collections. Corral’s poetry is full of often surprising linguistic twists and turns that challenge language to try and portray a little of his life as a queer son of Mexican immigrants. One of my favorite aspects of the book is that it doesn’t shy away from sensuality or sexual desire or difficult perspectives. For example, “Border Triptych,” a trio of sonnets, incorporates the voices of both immigrants and border patrol (often Latinx).
Recommended Text: Slow Lightning (2012)
Recommended Video
SONIA GUIÑASACA (They/Them)
Sonia Guiñansaca is an award winning queer migrant poet, cultural organizer and social justice activist who migrated to the United States at age five from Ecuador. My recommended text and their 2016 debut self-published chapbook, Nostalgia and Borders, is in its fourth reprint for good reason and has been translated into Spanish and Kichwa. Like Pelaez Lopez, their poems speak to the daily lived realities of an undocumented queer immigrant. In their poem, “Calling Cards” for example, the $5 or $10 cards migrants buy in bodegas to call to their families take on new significance. For Guiñansaca, they are an an “umbilical chord” that “have heartbeats” shedding light on those who live decades without seeing their families.
Recommended Text: Nostalgia and Borders (2016)
Recommended Video
DENICE FROHMAN (She/Her/Ella)
Nuyorican poet Denice Frohman is perhaps best known for her award-winning poetry performance style, having won numerous accolades such as Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, and having been featured on numerous stages from The Apollo to The White House. While I always recommend going down a YouTube rabbit hole of these incredible performances, Frohman’s textually published poetics is also to be studied. In the recommended text, Frohman takes on gender roles and a playful yet profound way; more published poems can be found on her website.
Recommended Text: “Lady Jordan” in The New York Times (2020)
Recommended Video
J. JENNIFER ESPINOZA (She/Her)
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet from Riverside, California whose poetry explores topics such as mental illness and life as a transgender woman as well as love, grief, anger, and beauty. In her second collection, There Should Be Flowers, Espinoza addresses both the beauty and suffering that often accompany the simple fact of being alive, especially as a trans woman. With unpretentious but elegant prose, Espinoza searingly asks us, “How long can I keep tricking you / into thinking what I’m doing / is poetry / and not me begging you / to let us live?” Often exploring her relationship to the body, Espinoza’s poetry is intimate, unapologetic and a powerful way to learn about the everyday labor that is the need “to prove I deserve to exist.”
Recommended Text: There Should Be Flowers (2016)
Recommended Video
ROQUE RAQUEL SALAS RIVERA (Él/Elle)
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (he/they) is a Puerto Rican poet and translator of trans experience born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. He is the author of six books and the recipient of numerous honors including being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, being longlisted for the National Book Award and winning the Lambda Literary Award. His 2021 book x/ex/exis is complex poetic inquiry into gender, culture, colonialism, transness and the limitations of language in a Puerto Rican context. A bilingual text with translations by Salas Rivera, provides an enriched experience for those who can engage with the text in both languages as the Spanish and English versions read differently, highlighting their respective linguistic nuances. Still, as Salas Rivera concludes "our reality is richer than language," a nod perhaps to the desire for new language and modes of expression.
Recommended Text: x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación (2021)
Recommended Video
FÉI HERNANDEZ (She/They)
Féi Hernandez is a trans poet/prosist, cultural worker, director/ filmmaker, designer/ illustrator, a life doula and formerly undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Their debut collection Hood Criatura is an energetic, and exciting new voice at the intersections of trans and queer resilience, citizenship and belonging, resistance against gentrification, anti-blackness and liberatory possibility. Through a wide variety of poetic forms and experimentations, Hernandez explodes binaries, borders, and other sorts of inauthentic boundaries. Make sure to read this soon, so you are fully ready for their next book, (UN)DOCUMENTE forthcoming in 2025!
Recommended Text: Hood Criatura (2020)
Recommended Video
ROY GUZMAN (They/Them)
Roy G. Guzmán is a Honduran poet and scholar raised in Miami, Florida. Their first collection, Catrachos (2020) was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. In addition to the title, “Catrachos,” a term of solidarity and resilience for Honduran people, I was immediately drawn to the collection’s 13 poems titled “Queerodactyl” which demonstrate a lot of the ingenuity and experimentation that make this book unique. Combinations of paleontology and voguing for example, demonstrate the emergence of a unique and important voice. Overall, Catrachos is a searing combination of honduran history, migrant childhood, and a contemporary queer experience.
Recommended Text: Catrachos (2020)
Recommended Video
The first Latinx poet to win the Yale Younger was more than 20 years ago and it is a poet named Sean Singer.
Great list.