Biography
I am the 2021 Texas State Artist-Poet Laureate. Among my honors: a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. My 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. I was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for my film and television reviews in The Washington Spectator. My eighth volume, The World That the Shooter Left Us, will be published by Four Way Books in February 2022. My second book of translations, To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu,, published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press iin 2023, was awarded a second Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Translation. Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022 (TCU University Press: Texas Poet Laureate Series) will be published on January 25, 2025.
Research Interests
Classical and Mediterranean History, African-American History and Culture, Catalan, French, Italian, and Spanish language and culture, Human Rights issues, Spirituality
Teaching Interests
Creative Writing, Literature, Film, Drama