poetry mini interviews

Why is poetry important? Poetry is important for many different reasons to different people. For me, it is a vehicle or a voice or an outlet...

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? I’d say James Tate and Alberto Ríos. With Tate, I had never read surreal prose poetry....

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began? When I first started writing poetry in my 20’s, I tended to write about politics a...

How do you know when a poem is finished? When the poem flows as well as it can. When the poem jumps off the page and demands to be read in o...

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The Ame...