Roy G. Guzmán
“I want to be able to use language as a way to awaken people, to remind people, ‘This is your history. These are the things that you did not know affect you, but they have in fact been affecting you.’”
Roy G. Guzmán
(c) Kai Coggin
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“Catrachos is a fervent, jaw-dropping debut, the kind of blistering chronicle that absolutely could not exist before this. Roy G. Guzmán stomps their unrepentant signature on the well-stomped landscape of the American life story until the hurt, triumph, restlessness, and redemption in these poems could only be theirs. You have read stories of leaving one land for another. You have heard stories about the difficulties of coming out to a staid family and church. But those fractured songs have never been sung this fiercely. Or this well.”
“[Catrachos] is a courageous polemic against a growing moral bankruptcy in America, as well as a tender personal story delivered with effortless lyricism.”
“Marked by poems that are lyrical and syntactically daring. . . . [Catrachos] nods to the perseverance of excavating a queer self and giving it flight”
“Who more than queer people—especially queer people of color—know what it’s like to dance in the face of danger, to sashay away in the face of extinction, to love in the face of stolen liberties? . . . The emergence of a powerful new force.”
Roy G. Guzmán is author of the celebrated debut poetry collection Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020), described as “blistering” by Publisher’s Weekly. They are the recipient of a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative grant and the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Their work has been included in the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, guest-edited by Natalie Diaz, and Best of the Net 2017, guest-edited by Eduardo C. Corral.
In 2016, Guzmán was the recipient of a Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, focusing on issues affecting migrant farm workers in Minnesota. That same year, they were chosen to participate in the fourth Letras Latinas Writers Initiative gathering, sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the MFA Program at Arizona State University. Roy returned to Arizona as a Letras Latinas Scholar in 2018.
Guzmán also participated in the first Poetry Incubator, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary, and was invited to run a workshop during the Incubator's second year. After the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, their poem “Restored Mural for Orlando” was turned into a chapbook with the help of poet and visual artist, D. Allen, to raise funds for the victims. With poet Miguel M. Morales, Roy edited the anthology Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando, published by Damaged Goods Press.
When asked about their poem, “Restored Mural for Orlando,” written after the Pulse nightclub massacre, Guzmán reflected on the impact of that event: “The memory and vicarious grief of the Pulse massacre will always stay with me. I can’t measure the kind of impact “Restored Mural for Orlando” had on the literary community, but I do know that the process of writing it completely altered how I read poetry, what I think about the possibilities of poetry, and beyond. If I ever lose my way in life, remind me that I once wrote this poem out of love and pain.”
Born in Honduras and raised in Miami, Florida, Guzmán holds degrees from the University of Minnesota, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the Honors College at Miami Dade College. They currently live in Minneapolis, where they are pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies (Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society) at the University of Minnesota.
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Catrachos
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