Cruel April is a poetry reading series that takes place in April,
in commemoration of National Poetry Month.
Events are always free and open to the public.

Photos of Cruel April 2024

Cruel April 2024 Poets

Juan Felipe Herrera served as the 21st United States Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was the first Latino ever to hold this position. Herrera is known for his often bilingual and autobiographical poems on immigration and Chicano identity. Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children, with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. His 2007 volume 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border contains texts in both Spanish and English that examine the cultural hybridity around questions of identity on the U.S.-Mexico border. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown. In 2011, Herrera was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.

Marcelo Hernández Castillo, poet and activist born in Zacatecas, Mexico and living in California, teaches in the MFA program at Ashland University, as well as to incarcerated youth in northern California. Hernández Castillo's poems and essays can be found in BuzzFeed, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Jubilat, Muzzle Mag, New England Review, The Paris American, and Southern Humanities Review among others. Along with C.D. Wright, Hernández Castillo translated the poems of Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe. His manuscript, Cenzóntle, was selected as the 2017 winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, from BOA Editions. It won the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His chapbook, Dulce, was selected for the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. A Pushcart nominee, Castillo has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Squaw Valley Writer's Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. Castillo was a cofounder of the Undocupoets campaign which eliminated citizenship requirements from major first poetry book prizes in the United States. Hernández Castillo was the first undocumented student to earn an MFA from the University of Michigan.

Dashel Hernández Guirado is an up-and-coming Cuban poet and visual artist living and working in Miami, Florida. He has actively contributed and participated in numerous arts and literature education programs working with Latino youth while residing in Syracuse, NY (2017-2019). He has published three poetry collections: Meditaciones (Ácana, 2015), Iluminaciones (Homagno, 2020), and El ancho río del silencio (Selvi, 2020), and his first novel, Herbario: 1978-1983 (Kýrne, 2023). His work explores personal and collective memories of Cuba in the 1980s from the perspectives of nostalgia, post-memory, and counter-memory. His work has been published, reviewed, and translated in Deinós, a critical journal on poetry and translation edited by Dr. Yoandy Cabrera, at Rockford University, Illinois (2020).

Emily Lee Luan is the author of Return (April 2023), winner of a Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, a former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2019, American Poetry Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Jentel, Millay Arts, Monson Arts, Lighthouse Works, and Storyknife. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark and is a 2023–24 Visiting Assistant Professor in the Syracuse University MFA program.

Vickie Vértiz’s writing is featured in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Huizache, Nepantla, the Los Angeles Review of Books, KCET Departures and Artbound, and the anthologies: Open the Door (McSweeney’s and the Poetry Foundation), and The Coiled Serpent (Tía Chucha Press), among many others. Her first full collection of poetry, Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut, published in the Camino del Sol Series at The University of Arizona Press, won a 2018 PEN America literary prize. She has been a resident or fellow at Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Macondo, CantoMundo, VONA, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Community of Writers. She currently teaches creative writing, writing for Chicanx Studies, writing for Gender Studies, and Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara.