Save the date: Join us on April 9, 2025 for the 16th annual Pankake Poetry Reading: Celebrating Bilingual Poetry with Roy G. Guzmán, author of “Catrachos” (Graywolf Press 2020), which was named a finalist for the 2021 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry.

Guzmán will be be reading work that reflects on a racialized queer immigrant childhood, poverty and working class life, as well as spaces where marginalized people can imagine new possibilities for themselves and others.

About the speaker

Roy G. Guzmán, photo by Kai Coggin

Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) is the author of “Catrachos” (Graywolf Press 2020), which was named a finalist for the 2021 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Poetry Award, from Claremont Graduate University. That same year, Roy was named a Debut Poet by Poets & Writers Magazine. Roy has been named a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry fellow. Their young adult memoir-in-verse, tentatively titled “How to Inhale Bleach,” is forthcoming from Scholastic.

Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Roy grew up in Miami, Florida. After the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Roy collaborated with D. Allen and Marco Antonio Huerta on a chapbook titled, Restored Mural for Orlando, to raise funds for the victims. With Miguel M. Morales, Roy coedited Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando, a collection of poems by numerous BIPOC writers responding to the same tragedy.

Roy has worked as a manuscript mentor and editor, taught at numerous colleges, and served as a teaching artist for institutions like Tin House and the Loft Literary Center. Roy’s work has been recently anthologized in collections such as What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family (edited by fellow Minnesota poet Sun Yung Shin), Queer Nature (edited by fellow UofM poet Michael Walsh), and the craft book, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (edited by Maya Jewell Zeller and UofM professor Kathryn Nuernberger).

Roy is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the U., where they also received an MFA in creative writing. They hold an M.A. from Dartmouth College and a B.A. from the University of Chicago, both in comparative literature.