My scholarly research and critical writing focus on Latinx literature, Latinx studies, poetry and poetics, poetry of the Americas, and Appalachian studies.

“Latinx world-making”, my mini-review of “The Chorus These Poets Create,” a Letras Latinas folio in Poetry Magazine, appears on Letras Latinas Blog 2 (December 2, 2024). Read the issue here.

My article “‘Mexican or Something’: Reading the Novels of Mexicanesque Appalachia” appears in Contemporary Literature (Fall 2024).

My essay “Music and Performance in Latino Poetry” features in the Latino Poetry Reader: Places We Call Home, a study guide for The Library of America Anthology of Latino Poetry, edited by Rigoberto González.

My review essay, “Making Scenes: Three Recent Reenactments of Puerto Rican Syndrome,” appears in The Georgia Review (Summer 2024). On recent books by Justin Torres, Urayoán Noel, and Éric Morales-Franceschini.

My lyric essay “On Landlords and Other Dispraises” appears in Issue 7 (April 20, 2024) of Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. With many thanks to editor Alicia Wright.

FORTHCOMING in A New American Vein: Critical Essays on Contemporary Appalachian Literature (edited by Nicole Drewitz-Crockett and Zackary Vernon): “Whose District 12?: Regional Studies, Ethnic Studies, and the School of Daniel Borzutzky.” Under contract with Ohio University Press. (Book Chapter)

My essay, “From Fowler to El Salvador: Juan Felipe Herrera’s Global We,” appears in Juan Felipe Herrera: Migrant, Activist, Poet Laureate, alongside contributions from other scholars and writers. The volume is edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez and is published by the University of Arizona Press, 2023. Order it here. The book won a Gold Medal for the 2023 International Latino Book Awards.

My review of Sarah M. Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature appears in Latino Studies (May 2023). Read it here.

Companion essays on Appalachian poetics appear in the January 2022 issue of Poetry, guest edited by Suzi F. Garcia, and on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. “Race and Radicalism in Appalachian Poetics” addresses the legacy of Don West, while “Appalachian Poetics in Four Acts” is a personal account of my relationship to Appalachian poetry.

My essay “It’s Been a While: Latinx Poetries and the Empire of Borders” appears in A Companion to American Poetry (Wiley Blackwell, 2022, edited by Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen). The TOC is here.

My review essay on Farid Matuk’s The Real Horse and Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction is in Chicago Review in a terrific issue on Jaime de Angulo. Read it here.

A short essay on Francisco Aragón’s After Rubén, excerpted and adapted from my Foreword to his forthcoming collection, is up on the Best American Poetry blog (March 2, 2020). You can order the Aragón’s book of poems and prose from Red Hen Press.

My short essay on teaching the novels of Helena María Viramontes appears in the March 2020 Latinx Talk Special Series on Latinx Migration Literature.

“Shakeout Poetics: Documentary Poetry from Men of Fact to Data Bodies,” my article on documentary poetics, is just out in a special issue (Poetry Networks) of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, edited by Kamran Javadizadeh and Robert Volpicelli (47.1, 2020).

My review of Harris Feinsod’s The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures appears in Modernism/modernity (25.3, 2018).

My essay “Quarantine Citizen: Latinx Poetry and the Matter of Capital” appears in Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, edited by Marcial González and Carlos Gallego, is available with the University of Michigan Press (November 2018).

My essay on U.S. Latinx poetry appears in The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry (spring 2018, edited by Stephen Hart).

September 2017: My article-listicle “Ten Must Read Latino Books,” in which I attempt to squeeze three times as many great Latinx books into a top ten, appears in the AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle. For AWP members, it’s available here.

March 2017: “Poetry from a Year of Precarity” is up at ASAP/J, the online arm of the terrific ASAP/Journal. This is a review essay of five exceptional books from 2016, by Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Don Mee Choi, Solmaz Sharif, and Rodrigo Toscano.

September 2016: “Ascendance and Abjection: Reading Latina/o Poetry in the Summer of Trump,” in The American Poetry Review.

August 2016. “They Must Be Re(pre)sented: Archiving Nuyorican Poetry’s ‘Diasporous’ Bodies.” Review essay of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, by Urayoán Noel. In Journal of Modern Literature.

Spring 2016. “Reinventing Ecopoetics: Chicano Poetry’s Undocumentary Turn.” In Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

“‘The black braid of names’: A Hemispheric Mapping of Martín Espada’s Lyric Monuments,” in Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada, published by Farleigh Dickinson University Press, edited by Edward J. Carvalho, April 2014, pp. 219-241. To buy this collection, click here.

“‘Andando entre dos mundos’: Towards an Appalachian Latino Literature,” in Appalachian Journal 39.3-4 (2012), pp. 270-288.

“‘Of the smog’: José Emilio Pacheco’s Concussive Poetics of Mexico City,” in Hispanic Review 79.2 (2011), pp. 291-316.

“‘A mountain / in my pocket’: The Affective Spatial Imagination in Post-1952 Puerto Rican Poetry,” in MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) 35.2 (2010), in a special issue on Multi-Ethnic Poetics edited by Keith Leonard and Meta Jones, pp. 41-67.

“Spaces for Congregation and Creative Play: Martín Espada’s and Victor Hernández Cruz’s Poetic Plazas,” in College Literature 37.2 (2010), pp. 1-23.

My commentary on poetry is posted on Progressive Poetics, a collaborative project curated and compiled by the poet H.L. Hix. Responding to Adorno, Auden, Tu Fu, and a string of short responses by poets and critics, Hix’s “one-question interview” has generated some tremendous commentaries. Here’s mine.

My book, American Political Poetry into the 21st Century was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. It’s available here. This book examines the language of individual and collective agency in various strains of contemporary American poetry and hip-hop music.

“Live Hip Hop, Collective Agency, and ‘Acting in Concert,’” in Popular Music and Society 30.1 (2007), pp. 75-90.

“Working in the Space of Disaster: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dialogues with America,” in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters 28.3 (2005), pp. 812-823.