about

Rodney Gomez is a poet and urbanist whose work explores the natural and built environments, culture, and history in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, he served as the 2020-2021 McAllen, Texas Poet Laureate. He is the author of Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2021), recipient of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for best book of poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, recipient of the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, and a finalist for the Balcones Prize; Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020), recipient of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series; Ceremony of Sand (YesYes Books, 2019), recipient of the Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Prize; Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018); and Mouth Filled With Night (Northwestern University Press, 2014), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize from Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium.

In 2020 he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship “given to honor poets of literary merit appointed to serve in civic positions and to enable them to undertake meaningful, impactful, and innovative projects that engage their fellow residents, including youth, with poetry, helping to address issues important to their communities”. Gomez’ time as Poet Laureate centered on the publication of an anthology of Rio Grande Valley youth poetry, numerous workshops, and creation of a poet laureate website. Rigoberto González has called Gomez a poet with a “remarkable vision” whose work “celebrates the borderlands, its strangeness and its stark beauty”. His other honors include the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize, the Rane Arroyo prize, and RHINO’s Editors’ Prize.

He is at work on a new manuscript of poems, visual poetry, and lyric essays supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellowship from Yale University, and a De Groot Foundation grant. He serves as advisory editor for FlowerSong Press, where he founded the Bougainvillea Prize to honor working class poets or collections for/about the working class; a board member of Public Poetry, a nonprofit based in Houston dedicated to the promotion of poetry in its many forms; and a board member of Newfound, a nonprofit publisher that publishes work which investigates how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. He holds a BA in philosophy from Yale, an MA in philosophy from Arizona State University, and both an MFA and MPA from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he was honored with the inaugural Alumni Merit Award from the College of Fine Arts.