By Brian Dunlap

Los Ángeles and Southern California have a long and rich history of Latinx literature starting with the arrival of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo’s Spanish expedition exploring the California coast in 1542. This voyage “produced the first written observations of the Los Angeles area.” Most famously though, the region’s Latinx literature began with the diary entries written by members Juan Crespí, Gaspar de Portolá and Miguel Costansó, of the Portolá expedition in 1769-1770.

In the intervening two and a half centuries since 1769, there’s been mostly a smattering of Latinx writing from diary entries and letters to journalism, most famously found in the pages of La Opinión, founded and first published on September 16, 1926 by Ignacio E. Lozano Sr., a Mexican immigrant. He chose September 16 to coincide with Mexico’s Independence Day.

Gradually, through most of the 20^th Century, books and novels set in or about Los Ángeles and Southern California by Chicanx writers, were being published. Due to Los Ángeles’ proximity to Mexico and the increased immigration to the U.S. of Mexicans escaping the violence of the Mexican Revolution, for most of the 20^th Century, the city and region’s population was primarily made up of Chicanx residents.

One of the earliest, the book of poetry, A Stab in the Dark by Facundo Bernal, was first published in the newspaper La Prensa in 1921, in Spanish. It wasn’t until 2019 that Bernal’s collection Palos de Ciego, was published in English by LARB Books. The book is “one of the earliest bodies of literature chronicling the experiences of Chicanos in Los Angeles.”

Other early books and short stories include: “Kid Zopilote” a short story by Mario Suárez, originally published in the Arizona Quarterly in 1947; City of Night by John Rechy (1963), Chicano by Richard Vásquez (1970), The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta (1973) and The Road to Tamazunchale by Ron Arias (1975).

Since the 1980’s, with the publication of the anthology Two Hundred and One: Homenaje a la Ciudad de Los Angeles/The Latino Experience in Los Angeles (1982), an anthology focused on the long-ignored voices of the Latino poets of Los Ángeles, The Moths and Other Stories by Eastside writer Helena Maria Viramontes (1985) and Poems Across the Pavement by Luis J. Rodriguez (1989), the Latinx literature of Los Ángeles and Southern California has grown tremendously. Salvadorian American Angeleños, Panamanian American Angeleños, Guatemalan American Angeleños, among others. These writers write their stories, from their perspectives, rooted in their cultures with many written in both Spanish and English. Some are political, others about family, others about healing from the generational trauma of systemic racism, some about taking back the control of their sexuality, among other topics.

There are even many Latinx focused open mics held from Sylmar to Pomona to Whittier.

In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, the following is a list of many Latinx writers of Los Ángeles and Southern California that deserve attention and show the breath and depth of their stories.

Briana Muñoz

Briana Muñoz is a writer from Southern California. Raised in San Diego, she spent a lot of her time at her mother’s Mexican folklore dance classes and at ranches where her father trained horses into the sunset. She is the author of two book of poetry Loose Lips (Prickly Pear Publishing, 2019) and her bilingual collection Everything is Returned to the Soil/Todo vuelve a la tierra (FlowerSong Press, 2021). In her work, Muñoz explores her personal and political identity and place, as exhibited in such poems as “My Tongue is a Thunderbolt” and “Evening Drive Through DTLA.”

Brenda Vaca

Brenda Vaca is a poet raised in South Whitter in a Mexican/Xicana family where the Apostolic and Raman Catholic traditions were a hardcore influence. She earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley. She went on to graduate school earning a Masters of Divinity and Masters of Arts in Biblical Languages from the Pacific School of Religion and Graduate Theological Union. She served as an ordained Elder for the United Methodist Church working primarily in “Latinx” communities until a life-changing interfaith pilgrimage to Central America in 2015. Vaca’s first book of poetry Riot of Roses (2021), is a confrontation, a confession, and an embrace. As she says in her Sims Library of Poetry interview: “I talk a lot about love, different kinds of love—divine love, romantic love, filial love among friends and family—so I talk a lot about love and a theme that runs through the book…is heartache and heartbreak…I also talk a lot about healing.”

Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl

Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl first published her poetry back in high school in her alma mater’s bilingual literary magazine, Las Voces. Diosa X has been a featured guest/reader for the Panamanian International & East LA Film Festival’s Take 2 Spoken Word, Los Angeles Poet Society, Pomona Art Walk, Sims Library’s Book Fair, La Otra Fil’s Mil Mujeres, Clubhouse’s Dark Side of the Truth, El Muzeo’s Poetic Voices, Latinas in Hollywood: Herstories and Boca de Oro, among others. She has been teaching and writing since her tender preteen years. Her first book of poetry A Church of My Own (2021) is about confessions and absolutions, a healing journey through the amalgamation of traditional and unconventional petitions. Diosa X’s second collection Hechizera: Sus Sultry Spells (2022) is a multilingual poetry collection that takes a deep dive into the land of the 13 Underworlds, the land of Hades and Persephone, the land of Mictlan. She explores human’s shadow selves, their wounded warrior, that side of humanity that is looked down upon. She does this and more with guidance of Xochiquetzal, the Mexica Goddess of beauty, sex, and fertility.

David A. Romero

David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. He offers a scholarship for high school seniors interested in spoken word and social justice: “The Romero Scholarship for Excellence in Spoken Word.” His uncle is the famous Chicano artist from East L.Á., Frank Romero, who paintings celebrate the Los Angeles culture of lowriders and ​“rascuache.” Earlier this year he was a guest for the inaugural Elba Poetry Festival in Tuscany. Romero’s poetry deals with family, identity, social justice issues, place and Latinx culture. He is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020), which, in a world mispronouncing his name, or trying to define it for him, is about Romero digging through his family history, his childhood memories, and stories of working people, to create his own meaning for his family’s name.

Matt Sedillo

Matt Sedillo was born in El Sereno, California in 1981. He has been described as the “best political poet in America” as well as “the poet laureate of the struggle” by academics, poets, and journalists alike. He has spoken at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, at numerous conferences and forums such as the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education, and at over a hundred universities and colleges. His Three Act Poem structure has been taught as capstones of coursework at UCLA and Occidental College. He writes from the vantage point of a second generation Chicano born in an era of diminishing opportunities and a crumbling economy. His writing includes a blend of humor, history and political theory. Sedillo’s most recent poetry collection City on the Second Floor (FlowerSong Press, 2022) is a meditation on how the world we build and rebuild every day attacks us in so very many unexamined ways.

Cynthia Guardado

Cynthia Guardado is a Salvadorian-American poet from Inglewood, California. She works as a professor of English at Fullerton College and is the managing editor of the college’s literary journal LiveWire. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Cenizas (University of Arizona Press, 2022) and ENDEAVOR (World Stage Press, 2017). Guardado won the Concurso Binacional De Poesía Pellicer-Frost award in 2017, and Cenizas was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2019. In Cenizas, Guardado offers a portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. She questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history.

Luis J. Rodriguez

Luis J. Rodriguez grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. He is a poet/novelist/memoirist/short story writer/children’s book writer/essayist as well as a community & urban peace activist, mentor, healer, youth & arts advocate, husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He was the official Poet Laureate of Los Angeles from 2014-2016. He is founding editor of Tia Chucha Press, focused on socially engaged poetry and literature that matters, now for over 30 years, and more than 20 years ago he co-founded with his wife Trini Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley. He has 16 books in all genres (poetry, children’s books, fiction, and nonfiction), including the best-selling memoir, Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Curbstone Press, 1993) and most recently the essay collection From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2020). In From Our Land to Our Land, Rodriguez writes about race, culture, identity, and belonging and what these all mean and should mean (but often fail to) in the volatile climate of the United States.

Daniel A. Olivas

Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, is an award-winning author, playwright, and, since 1990, an attorney in the California Department of Justice’s Public Rights Division. Olivas earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was raised near downtown Los Angeles, the middle of five children. He is the author of, most recently, How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2022), a collection of folkloric stories that are surreal, dystopian, critical, and introspective, ultimately moving into contemporary political rhetoric, depicting Chicano culture.

Reyna Grande

Reyna Grande was born in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico and was two years old when her father left for the U.S. to find work. Her mother followed her father two years later, leaving Grande and her siblings behind in Mexico. When she was nine, she left Iguala to make her own journey north. After attending Pasadena City College for two years, Grande became the first person in her family to set foot in a university. At UC Santa Cruz she earned a B.A. in creative writing and film & video and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University. Grande writes about immigration, family separation, language trauma, the price of the American Dream, and her writing journey. She is the author, most famously, of the memoir The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012), about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. Grande is the winner of an American Book Award, among other prizes and awards.

Iris De Anda

Iris De Anda is a Guanaca Tapatia poet, speaker and musician who has been featured with KPFK & KPFA Pacifica Radio, organized with Academy of American Poets, performed at Los Angeles Latino Book Festival, Feria del Libro Tijuana, Mexico and Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba. Born and raised on the Eastside, she is an activist and practitioner of the healing arts. De Anda believes in the power of spoken word, poetry, storytelling, and dreams. She is the author of the poetry collections Roots of Redemption: You have No Right to Remain Silent (FlowerSong Press, 2022) and Codeswitch: Fires from Mi Corazon (Los Writers Underground Press, 2014). A political poet, in Roots of Redemption, De Anda serves as witness to the range of travesties and tragedies resulting from the Trump Era and what came before and continues. She also writes about transformation: personal, social and global.

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, moved to the United States at two and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. In high school and afterwards, he worked a series of retail jobs, selling everything from eggs and milk to used appliances, custom furniture, rock T-shirts, and body jewelry. After graduating from the University of California-Riverside, he went on to earn an MFA from UC-Irvine’s Program in Writing. He’s the author of two novels Still Water Saints (Random House, 2007) and The Five Acts of Diego León (Random House, 2013) and his most recent book Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime (Unnamed Press, 2019). His writing engages in discussions about the right to freedom of sexual expression and where it fits in within the larger aims of the LGBTQ community, sexual identity, history and community.

Poet Astrid

Poet Astrid is a Salvadoran American poet and journalist from Los Ángeles, now living in Long Beach. She attended California State University, Dominguez Hills, where she was captain of the slam poetry team and president of the poetry club, F.L.O.W. She has shared her editorial voice at L.A. Taco, an independent news publication that brings raw and street-level journalism from all corners of L.A. County, to its populous. Astrid is the author of the poetry collection Through the Soil in My Skin (World Stage Press, 2020), about a lesson on what love is, not and what love should be. It’s of falling in love for the first time & breaking your heart for the last time. All through the context of coming of age and learning to love oneself as no one else can.

liz gonzalez

liz gonzalez is a fourth generation Southern Californian, born and raised in the San Bernardino Valley. She currently lives in Long Beach and loves to hike in the chaparral and bike on the coast. A creative writing and community activist, since 1993 gonzalez has presented her writing; participated on literary panels; conducted creative writing workshops at a variety of settings, including universities and colleges, conferences, public libraries, community centers, and elementary schools. gonzalez teaches creative writing at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She is the author of, most recently, Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, 2018), poems set against the diverse landscapes of the San Bernardino Valley and Los Angeles that illuminate the trials and beauty of girls’ and women’s journeys to reclaim themselves. She explores memories, pivotal experiences, and cultural influences that shaped her: the death of a father, family relationships that nurture and challenge and the joys and struggles of growing up as a nontraditional Catholic Mexican American. She’s currently working on the historical creative nonfiction essay chapbook The Original OLG: The First Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in San Bernardino.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo was raised in San Gabriel, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Bermejo is co-founder and director of Women Who Submit, a literary organization fighting for gender parity by empowering women and non-binary writers to submit work for publication. Though she is not fluent in Spanish, like many children of immigrants, it’s a language she can understand better than speak, and it’s a language that weaves in and out of her life at all and any times. She said in an LAPL blog interview that “my poems imagine more just futures full of love and compassion and healing. My poems imagine ways of dismantling monuments, markers, and structures of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy to make wider, more welcoming spaces for all people.” Bermejo is the author of the poetry collection Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016), uses Spanglish and, she says in the same interview “certain poems in the collection work to illustrate what this kind of experience with Spanish can feel or look like. Other poems remember that language is one way we connect to others and tries to make that connection a little more clear.” Plus, the collection embraces familia, of places long gone and present, of abandoned things, near or in a neighborhood house.

Natalie Sierra

Natalie Sierra is a first generation Latinx author, poet, mother, wife and editor. She also teaches writing workshops. She writes erotica, about love, mental health disorders, familial relationships, identity, Greek mythology and gothic poetry, among other topics and themes. Sierra’s books are the novel Charlie Forever and Ever (FlowerSong Press, 2021) and the poetry collection Medusa (DSTL Arts, 2020). She lives in Pomona.

Yesika Salgado

Yesika Salgado is a Los Angeles based Salvadoran poet from the Silver Lake—Echo Park neighborhood, who writes about her family, her culture, her city, and her fat brown body. She is a poet and activist who hails from the spoken word world, becoming a two time National Poetry Slam finalist. She is an internationally recognized body-positive activist. Salgado originally gained a following for her poetry on Instagram. In an L.A. Times article it says of Salgado, “Salgado is part of a new generation of artists established on the stage — through the spoken word and slam traditions — and magnified on the internet.” She is the author of three poetry collections Corazón (Not a Cult, 2018), Tesoro (Not a Cult, 2018) and Hermosa (Not a Cult, 2019).

Gustavo Hernandez

Gustavo Hernandez is a poet born in Jalisco, Mexico and raised in Santa Ana, California. His work moves through complex roads of loss, immigration and sexuality. He explores places both physical and emotional—the rural landscapes of Jalisco, busy cities of California and memory. His work is also about the queer experience. Hernandez says in an Instinct Magazine interview about writing poetry, “I’ve been writing verse in one form or another my whole life…it just always felt natural to me and made me feel good.” Being on immigrant and being gay, he said in the same interview, “made me hyper-conscious of geography, both physical and emotional, and that has become a big part of my writing and defining aspect” of his first full length collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press, 2021). Hernandez is also the author of the micro chapbook Form His Arms (Ghost City Press, 2020).

Gustavo Arellano

Gustavo Arellano is a Chicano writer and journalist and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was born and raised in Anaheim to Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy. He worked for 15 year at the OC Weekly, an alternative weekly, where he penned the column ¡Ask A Mexican! It was a satirical column, where readers submitted questions about Mexican American people and culture—their customs, labor issues and illegal immigration, and Arellano responded in a politically incorrect manner. For the L.A. Times he covers Southern California everything and a bunch of the West. He is the author of four books including Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (Scribner, 2012) and co-author of A People’s Guide to Orange County (University of California Press, 2022).

Michael Jamie-Becerra

Michael Jamie-Becerra is novelist, short story writer and essayist from El Monte. His work focuses on place, the working class Chicano community and culture in Southern California, specifically the Chicano community of his hometown and the wider culture of SoCal and identity. His love of literature was fostered by his mother weekly trips to the local library. Jamie-Becerra’s stories evoke the sights and sounds of the streets he grew up amongst, its homes and storefronts, with these details grounding his narratives. He teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is the other of two books, the novel This Time Tomorrow (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), about struggling Mexican American families in El Monte, love and family and the short story collection Every Night is Lady’s Night (Harper Perennial, 2005), a collection of linked short stories that offer a portrait of working class individuals aching to find their place in an indifferent world.

Alex Petunia

Alex Petunia was born and raised in Chicago and now resides in Los Angeles. She is a nurse and poet of Puerto Rician and white decent. She has drummed in an all-girl rock band and whenever she can, she will hug a tree, frolic barefoot with the earth and share a breath with you. Her debut poetry collection Tending My Wild (World Stage Press, 2021) is about the trauma she experienced growing up and her unleashing, her shedding, her rooting, along her journey to heal. As a queer, multiracial child in a home of broken bottles, as she grows older she evolves into a woman with self-worth and a deepening purpose, through self-care.

Andrés Sánchez

Andrés Sánchez is a poet whose journey as a writer began to develop upon participating in the Community Literature Initiative Program. According to the Shoutout LA interview, “the program supported me in developing my manuscript.” As a transgender person, their book My Body (Word Stage Press, 2020), is about intersectionalities such as being a transgender person, mental health, their migration to the United States from Mexico and how all of these things affect their relationship to people whether romantic, familiar, or platonic connections. Chronicling their healing journey. Sánchez spend a large portion of their childhood growing up in Orange County.

Luivette Resto

Luivette Resto, a mother, teacher, poet, and Wonder Woman fanatic, was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx. She now lives in the San Gabriel Valley with her three children aka her revolutionaries. She is on the Board of Directors for Women Who Submit, a non profit organization in Los Angeles focused on women and nonbinary writers. In an LAPL blog interview Resto says she got into poetry when “I started writing short one-page chapter books when I was in 7th grade.” She also says about her writing, “A lot of my work is drawn from my life and experiences.” Intimate poems about her childhood and sex life, among other topics. Resto’s work centers around the themes of inheritance, shame, grief, resilience, spirituality, and the multitudinous roles of women, especially in her most recent book of poetry Living on Islands Not Found on Maps (FlowerSong Press, 2022).

Carolina Rivera Escamilla

Carolina Rivera Escamilla grew up in an El Salvador of social, economic and political repression, resulting in the Salvadoran Civil War, fought between the military-lead dictatorship backed by the U.S. and a coalition of left-wing guerrilla groups. She fled, first went into exile, in Canada and eventually settled in Los Ángeles in 1990. Still, she was able to find life full of magical experiences, according to her website, within the intimate life of extended family. Escamilla published a collection of interconnected short stories …after… (World Stage Press, 2015). It’s a fictionalized version of her childhood with the young woman entering into exile. Escamilla explores the personal impact of the political.

Erica Ayón

Erica Ayón is a poet who emigrated from Mexico when she was five years old and grew up in South Central, Los Angeles. She attended UCLA and graduated with a B.A. in English. In 2009 she was selected as a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow. She has taught poetry to middle and high school students across Los Angeles. Her work involves capturing her Mexican American community in South Central, chronicling her journey immigrating to the US and settling into a new country, culture and language. Her poems read like moments in time. Much of this is chronicled in her debut poetry collection Orange Lady (World Stage Press, 2017).

Carribean Fragoza

Carribean Fragoza is a writer, journalist and artist from South El Monte. As she says about her writing on her website, “Growing up in the peripheries of the Greater LA region and outside of [the] Chicano communities of East LA that have largely come to define Chicano identity, including in culture and literature, has shaped my literary approach. Rather than sticking to usual tropes of Chicanx and Latinx writing, I break onto new thematic territory with unique character voices and perspectives.” Fragoza draws from international queer and feminist literary movements and uses experimental approaches and devices. She is also the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP), a multi-disciplinary arts collective. Her most recent book is the collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You (City Lights Publishers, 2021).

Vickie Vértiz

Vickie Vértiz is a poet, educator, advocate and oldest child of an immigrant Mexican family from Bell Gardens. She has over 25 years of experience in social justice, writing, and education. Vickie has taught creative writing and given craft talks since 2008. She teaches creative writing, writing for Chicanx Studies, writing for Gender Studies, summer bridge writing for EOP students, and Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work explores, according to her website, “colonization, privilege, and displacement as intimate, everyday occurrences—in the intimate spaces between sisters, lovers, and neighborhoods.” Her work also explores the concerns of working class and queer people of color. This is evident in her full length poetry collection Palm Frond with its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press, 2017). Vértiz is also the author of the chapbook Swallows (Finishing Line Press, 2013).

Leslie Ortega

Leslie Ortega is a Latina poet from Orange County California. She spent most of her time working as an Accountant writing the poems in her self published chapbook in an incognito window at work. Her poems speak personally to her lived experience as a Chicanx who grew up and lives in Southern California; family—heartwarming, powerful and funny poems about her bus driver father; identity and racism.

Violeta Esquivel

Violeta Esquivel aka ‘La Poeta Violeta’ is a LatinX spoken word artist. At 10 years old, she became the youngest performer with Get Lit-Words Ignite; performing classic and original poems to promote literacy and language arts in schools. She is a published poet who uses her words to powerfully cope with stressors in her life and advocate for humanity. She speaks on climate change, LatinX-girl power, immigration reform, and gun violence. Her poem on gun violence was one of 3 in the country chosen for publication by CNN. She has performed all across Southern California.

Fernando Albert Salinas

Fernando Albert Salinas is a poet and activist from the Fox Hills neighborhood of Culver City. He is on the Board of Directors for California Poets in the Schools, the Ventura County Area Coordinator, and a Master Poet-Teacher. He is an Adjunct Professor of English at Ventura College, the Ventura County Area Coordinator and recitation coach for the California Arts Council’s Poetry Out Loud program. He focuses on enhancing the presence and appreciation of poetry and the literary arts, raising awareness of the power of literature, poetry, and the spoken word. In his book of poetry Toxic Masculinity (FlowerSong Press, 2021), his poems explore being raised in a world of toxic masculinity, gangs, violence, systemic/structural racism. As he says in the jacket copy for the book, “this book is a collection of poems based upon the lives of those that I have grieved, loved, feared, respected, and survived.”

Obed Silva

Obed Silva was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States as a toddler. A former gang member—he is paralyzed from the waist down, the result of a gunshot wound—he earned a master’s degree in medieval literature and is now an English professor at East Los Angeles College. His first book is the memoir The Death of My Father the Pope (Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2021), about the heartbreak of mourning the death of a family member while wrestling with resentment and frustration caused by the addiction that family member had.

Ron Arias

Ron Arias is a journalist, author and native Angeleño who grew up in the Frog Town/Elysian Valley neighborhood that adjoins the Los Ángeles River. The neighborhood is the allegorical setting for much of his fictional work. While attending UCLA Arias met, and quickly married, his wife. His novel The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) has been recognized as a milestone in Chicano literature. The novel depicts the last days of Fausto Tejada, an old widower being cared for by his teenage niece in Los Angeles and occasionally visited by the spirit of his dead wife. The novel diverges from the tradition of Chicano literature that focuses on learning to understand reality, creating a Chicano version of history and bringing order to the world. “Instead, Arias’ protagonist is more a creator of worlds than an interpreter of them,” according to The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Arias’ work as a whole is influenced by twentieth-century Latin American literature as he has been called “a post-modernist who integrates in his fiction a keen eye for actual Mexican-American experience,” according to the now defunct Book Rags website.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is Chicanx poet and teacher from Southeast L.Á. County. He writes prose poems that weaves together surreal fantasy set in Los Ángeles and poems of realism about his experience of being a Chicanx, family and culture. There is a distinct sense of place in his poetry, whether places in used directly or indirectly in an individual poem. His chapbook The Fire Eaters (Texas Review Press, 2020) collects his surreal prose poems that depict a fire eater, a man in a Pink Floyd t-shirt, etc. in poems weaving magic and duality.