4/22/25

Latino Poetry:
Places We Call Home

For National Poetry Month, read at DC’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in discussion with Elizabeth Acevedo, Juan Morales, and Alexandra Lytton Regalado for a special poetry reading and celebration of the new publication Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (LOA #382). In conversation with Georgetown University’s Ricardo Ortiz. My thanks to the DC Public Library and Letras Latinas.

Great video of the reading and conversation
(Courtesy of the DC Public Library)

12/14/24

Read with Natalie Illum & Miller Oberman at the American Poetry Museum in celebration of Miller's new book, Impossible Things. Such a great reading and it was a delight to read with Natalie and Miller. Natalie made a decision to read newer unpublished work and I followed her lead and read some newer work. Many times hearing a new poem read aloud is an important part of the editorial process. So it was great to gauge the response from the audience to these new pieces that represent a new direction for my work -- much more autobiographical from recent history than the familial work of the past.

12/10/24

Delighted to discover the Poetry Foundation sent out my poem, “Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam,” as “Poem of the Day” on Emily Dickinson’s birthday! I’ve really appreciated the number of folks who’ve left messages about this poem. It appeared in my first book, The Space Between Our Danger And Delight.

12/01/24

Grateful that a new poem of mine, “Instructions Upon Arrival,” appears in the December issue of Poetry magazine as part of a portfolio celebrating Letras Latinas’ 20th Anniversary! Thanks to Francisco Aragon and Laura Esquivel for choosing to include my poem and to the editors for their work on this issue!

Hybrid Essay Poems Included:
"Urraca" on Gloria Anzaldúa
and the Power of Place"

Imaniman: Poets Writing In
the Anzalduan Borderlands

Aunt Lute Books

Edited by ire'ne lara silva & Dan Vera

With a Foreward by U.S. Poet Laureate
Juan Felipe Herrera

In homage to Gloria Anzaldúa and her iconic work Borderlands/La Frontera, award-winning poets ire’ne lara silva and Dan Vera have assembled the work of 54 writers who reflect on the complex terrain—the deeply felt psychic, social, and geopolitical borderlands—that Anzaldúa inhabited, theorized, explored, and invented.

“Within shifting borders—it is good to enter into these voice worlds—to stand, bow & listen in their presence. Peoples, familias, cities, towns, rancherías and the wilderness of all border-crossers & messengers of border spaces open in these pages.”

Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate

“I can’t stress how amazing this book is... Quite simply, there's much to learn and appreciate here and you’d be hard pressed to find a fresh anthology that offers so many voices of different backgrounds in one place.”

Glass: A Journal of Poetry

“this book, Speaking Wiri Wiri, has quickly become one of my favorite books of poems from a contemporary Latino poet. I think it's fantastic.”

Daniel Chacón, Words On A Wire

“Writing with authority, assurance and passion, Speaking Wiri Wiri earns Vera his rightful place alongside his poetry heroes, living and dead.”

Dallas Voice

Speaking Wiri Wiri

Red Hen Press

Letras Latinas/Red Hen
Poetry Prize winner
Introduction by Orlando Menes

“Top Ten “New” Latino Author
to Watch (and Read)”

“a prescient understanding of the copious interplay between language and culture, made more lush still by the mediation of his Romantic imagination.”

Orlando Menes

“These poems evoke the various ways that language exiles us and embodies the indelible past — who we are, where we came from, how we know.”

Valerie Martínez

“a careful look at the untraceable impacts of the words that surround us. Each of us—whether we mean to or not—looks back to find out where we are and why we are what we are. Dan Vera’s new collection operates as a kind of soulful blueprint for this search.”

Tim Seibles

“Full of longing and bittersweet humor, these poems are lyrical, narrative, poignant, and always powerful. In his own search for who and what he really is, Vera has given us a true portrait of the confused and often contradictory place that is modern America.”

Linda Rodriguez

“a talented, sophisticated poet who is a master at playing with words.”

LatinoStories.com

The Space Between Our
Danger and Delight

Beothuk Books

Best Book -Monserrat Review

“The poetry of Dan Vera is clear, strong, honest and funny. He’s the sharp-eyed observer in the corner who doesn’t say much, but makes every word count. He handles the political and the personal with equal grace, even as the lines blur. Dan Vera is damn good company. You’ll see.”

Martín Espada

“This is what we first understood poetry to be, miraculous and humble. In the deepest part of the heart where we truly reside, there is always a wish that poetry will rinse off artifice. This is it. This is the most satisfying book of poems we can read if we want to witness language with a real poet as its servant.”

Grace Cavalieri

“Ranging through landscape and history, family legacy and gay life, Dan Vera's poems are melodic, lucid, and concise examinations of "the limits of earthly loving." They remind us of what blessings the world possesses and what flesh-hating forces endanger those delights.”

Jeff Mann

Poems Included:
"The Antiviral Speaks / Critical Mass"
& "Azabache Floribunda"

America's Future:
Poetry & Prose In Response
To The Future

Edited by Caroline Bock & Jona Colson

Washington Writers Publishing House

The anthology arrives at an urgent moment in our nation’s history, when many are anxiously questioning: What are the possibilities for the future? Some pieces turn to our past, reckoning with the wounds we still carry in today’s scars before questioning the future. Others turn their gaze forward, imagining the ways hope and reinvention can carve new paths.

Latino Poetry:
The Library of America Anthology

Library of America #382

Edited by Rigoberto Gonzalez

Top pick for Hispanic Heritage Month
- Good Morning America

A groundbreaking collection that captures as never before the richness, diversity, and power of the Latino poetic imagination. Includes more than 180 poets, spanning from the seventeenth century to today, and presents poems written in Spanish in original form and in English translation.

“a wondrous journey through the passions, the ideas, and the diversity of a people redefining what it means to be American”

Héctor Tobar, Pulitzer Prize winner

“It’s about more than the written word. It’s about music, rhythm, and the unspoken language of our families and communities.”

Dr. Rossy Evelin Lima

Poem Included "Small Shame Blues"

Poem Included: "Pilgrimage"

Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology

Edited by Julie E. Bloemeke
& Dustin Brookshire

Madville Publishing

Offers 54 poets' takes on often-unsung facets of this diamond in a rhinestone world-calling in Dolly's impeccable comedic timing, her lyric mastery, her business acumen, and her Dollyverse advocacy. These poems remind us to be better and to do better, to subvert Dolly cliché, and they encourage us to weave Dolly metaphor into our own family lore. Within these pages, Dolly takes the stage and the dinner table; readers see the public Dolly of the silver screen and the private Dolly of identity contemplation. Dolly raises praise and question, and she butterflies into our hearts to unabashedly to claim the mantra In Dolly We Trust.

Ghost Fishing:
An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology

Edited by Melissa Tuckey
Forward by Camille T. Dungy

University of Georgia Press

The first anthology to focus solely on poetry with an eco-justice bent. A culturally diverse collection entering a field where nature poetry anthologies have historically lacked diversity, this book presents a rich terrain of contemporary environmental poetry with roots in many cultural traditions.Eco-justice poetry is poetry born of deep cultural attachment to the land and poetry born of crisis. Aligned with environmental justice activism and thought, eco-justice poetry defines environment as “the place we work, live, play, and worship.” This is a shift from romantic notions of nature as a pristine wilderness outside ourselves toward recognition of the environment as home: a source of life, health, and livelihood.

Poem Included: "Abecedarian Yellow"

Poem Included:
“Because Love Remains Dear”

Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric Hate and Fear

Edited by Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Pam Uschuk

Cutthroat Press

A special collection of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, meant to address the rise in the public rhetoric of hatred and fear, prompted by the 2016 presidential campaign and election. Writers from diverse cultures, genders, ethnic backgrounds and races from all over the U.S. respond in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to social issues ranging from immigration, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, rights for people with disabilities, African American Rights, Indigenous American Rights and Latino rights, poverty, inequality, the attack on our natural environment and more.

Poem Included: “A General Gloom Pervades This Community"

Traveler's Vade Mecum

Edited by Helen Klein Ross

Red Hen Press

Everyman’s meets Twitter. Most anthologies gather poems already written. This is a crowd-sourced compilation of new poems, inspired by a tweet that linked the anthologist to an historical document. It’s a compendium of new works by 65 poets, including some of the most celebrated working today. For poetry lovers and lovers of history.

The original Traveler’s Vade Mecum, published in 1853, contained thousands of telegrams. Ross chose telegrams as titles for poems solicited from dozens of poets, including Bollingen Prize winner Frank Bidart and former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins to create a digital-age compendium of old-world poetics. Here are lyric poems, language poems, prose poems, found poems, haikus, pantoums, ekphrases, epistolary poems, acrostics, sonnets and mirror sonnets. Demonstrating the range of what poetry can do, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into the habits and social aspects of 19th century America―and shows how we have evolved 163 years later.

Poems Included: “Balinesia in Suburbia”
& “How The Rivers First Flowed”

Queer South: LGBTQ Writers
On the American South

Edited by Douglas Ray

Sibling Rivalry Press

American Library Association
"Over the Rainbow Project Book List"

Douglas Ray has assembled over 60 queer-identified voices exploring their experiences of the American South in nonfiction and poetry. From hilarious to heartbreaking, anxious to angry, religious to reluctant, contemplative to celebratory, this anthology expands our ideas of what it means to be queer and what it means to represent the land south of the Mason-Dixon.

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