Poetry: Isabella DeSendi, Laura Cresté, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, and Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.

Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and was published in 2020. Recently she has been named a New Jersey Poetry Fellow, was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and has been named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle‘s $15,000 Poetry Prize, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Laura Cresté is the author of You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships and other support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Community of Writers, Monson Arts, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Cortland Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a three-time International Latino Book Award winner, and a BRIO award recipient. She has earned writing fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights, The Frost Place, The Ashbery Home School, VONA, Candela Playwrights, Dramatic Question Theater, and NALAC. With two master’s degrees in education and an MFA in performance studies, Peggy’s work appears in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, ¡Manteca!, great weather for MEDIA, and What Saves Us, as well as online in Poets.org, The Quarry at Split This Rock, The Common, Tribes.org, and NACLA.org. She has been featured at Solfest Latine Theater Festival, The Dodge Poetry Festival, Lincoln Center, HBO Habla Women, The Smithsonian Institute, PEN America, Harvard University, and AWP. 

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the co-editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón and the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer|Arts|Mentorship. He lives in New York, where he serves as managing director at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.