Tomás Q. Morín
Photo by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon
Bio
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collections Machete (Knopf, 2021), Patient Zero (Copper Canyon, 2017), and A Larger Country (American Poetry Review, 2012), winner of the Honickman First Book Prize. His memoir Let Me Count the Ways is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 2022. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, as well as the translator of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. He is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Poetry, Slate, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Does any art have more members who struggle with impostor syndrome than writing? While I have a few poetry collections under my belt, and am on the eve of a memoir being published, I still worried I might be seen as merely moonlighting in the world of prose. The judges awarding me this Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts have made me feel welcomed as a peer, as someone who has something to say about racism, fatherhood, education, and the daily debacle and glory of living in a country that can’t seem to make up its mind about whether it wants us or not. I’m grateful for the faith of the judges in my work, for giving me the gift of time and space to try and write something tender, funky, and wild, something that might speak for us, to us, and through us.