Roy G. Guzmán

Roy G. Guzmán received a 2019 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. In Catrachos (Graywolf Press), Roy G.Guzmán first collection of poems, he reaches across borders―between life and death and between countries―invoking the voices of the lost. Catrachos, a name for the people of Honduras, is also a term of solidarity and resilience. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, this collection finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity―an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice. The Latino Book Review called Catrachos  “A creative and often harrowing look at society’s mistreatment of queer Latinx bodies, and their stunning resilience.”