Oliver de la Paz
Photo by Danielle Papandrea Photography
Bio
Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses (SIU Press), Furious Lullaby (SIU Press), Requiem for the Orchard (U. Akron Press), Post Subject: A Fable (U. Akron Press), and The Boy in the Labyrinth (U. Akron Press). He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U. Akron Press). He serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman Advisory Board and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Artist Trust, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He is an associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and a core faculty member of the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
The urgency for the poem in this moment is palpable, and I am filled with gratitude towards the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, their steadfast belief in artists, and the affirmation of poetic inquiries. I have always been interested in the shapes my words fill—and always for me the most malleable shapes have been poems. My parents, in the midst of political upheaval and great peril, left their home when I was a child. I have been trying to reshape that place ever since. Now, as a father, I have been looking for ways to articulate the shape of my self-understanding for my sons and the forms and structures of my understanding have been pieced together with images and conversations. In some ways I think I have formed a home for myself in affirming where I have come from and where I hope to go. I am grateful to the communities who have become my home and am thankful for the space and time this fellowship will generously support.