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Our Mission

Undocupoets promotes the work of poets who are currently or formerly undocumented in the United States and raises consciousness about the structural barriers we face in the literary community. We believe in supporting all poets, regardless of immigration status.

Fellowship Overview

The Undocupoets Fellowship annually grants two $500 fellowships, with no strings attached, to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States.

In partnership with the Fine Arts Work Center, each Undocupoets Fellowship includes a fully funded opportunity to attend the 2025 Summer Workshop Program in Provincetown, MA.

Undocupoets Fellows

In the interest of protecting the identity and status of our second 2020 Undocupoets Fellow, we will not announce their name. This is a statement they have written in lieu of a biography: "As a poet of African descent, I understand what it means to belong to two places at once. But I also understand what it means to be deserted by one as a result of the distance created by involuntary migration and displaced by one because of draconian laws. My sense of identity flows through my verse: through it I am coping, overcoming, surviving, and reaching joy. More than anything, poetry is an act of service for self-actualization and freedom."

Juan Rodriguez was born in Veracruz, Mexico. He is an undocumented, disabled writer of color residing in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Our Team

Esther Lin

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. Her book Cold Thief Place is the winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, forthcoming in March 2025. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. Her poem “French Sentence” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize, and “Cholera Is What My Grandfather Did During the War” was awarded the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Her poem “Habit” is included in Best New Poets 2022, as is “Season of Cherries” in 2023’s Best of the Net Anthology. Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Books by Esther Lin

Winner of the 2023 Alice James Award

“The people inhabiting Esther Lin’s poems have been handed a map that details the path to the most splendid home. But the journey might be impossible. Though they travel with care and attention, though they find places to settle along the way, the subjects of Cold Thief Place keep searching for a place where there is comfort and restful love. These heartrending poems are full of grief and struggle, but they hold the spark of all the possibilities available in our most dearly-held dreams. A gorgeous and timely book.”

—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

Janine Joseph

Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph arrived at the age of eight and lived undocumented in the U.S. for fifteen years. She is the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems, winner of the 2024 Virginia Literary Award for Poetry, and Driving Without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. She is also co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, an anthology of poetry and poetics forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic, Orion, Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Poets & Writers, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Poem-a-Day, and the Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be American” project. A librettist, her commissioned works for Symphony New Hampshire, Washington Master Chorale, and Houston Grand Opera include Extraordinary Motion: Concerto for Electric Harp, The Art of Our Healers, What Wings They Were, ‘On This Muddy Water’: Songs from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother’s Mother. A MacDowell Fellow and 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow/Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech

Books by Janine Joseph

“Along the stunningly crafted and radiant syntax of Decade of the Brain, I edge the edges of languages, bodies, selfhood, and estrangement, into experiences of disorientation. Joseph's speakers articulate the strangeness of living in relation to other past and simultaneous selves changed by injury, intimacy, notions of citizenship, and nation. Each line is a shock of words, then an unraveling. Dense with expansive, precise sound, this book is a stunning grappling with the possibility and powers of an irreconcilable self.”
—Aracelis Girmay

Driving Without a License
2018 da Vinci Eye Award Winner
2018 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist
Honorable Mention for The New England Poetry Club’s 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Poetry Book Prize
2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner
A Library Journal Top Poetry Pick for Spring 2016
Finalist for the 2016 Julie Suk Award
A 2016 Pleiades Magazine Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award

“Through her variety of lines, of old and new forms, and of voices adopted and inhabited, Joseph, herself Filipina-American, does justice to the raw emotions around immigration with verve.”
—Publishers Weekly

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir (Harper Collins), Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions), Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize (Northwestern University Press) and is the co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. His work has been long listed for the California Book Award, the Foreword Indies Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award, among other recognitions and citations. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award. He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. He served as distinguished fellow for the Marshall Project’s Art For Justice initiative from the University of Arizona which advocates for prison reform and is an inaugural winner of the Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket books and the Mellon Foundation. He currently serves as faculty in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California and the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.

Books by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.

Support

Undocupoets is hosted by Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and has been supported by grant from the Amazon Literary Partnership (ALP) and Academy of American Poets Poetry Fund, the Literary Arts Emergency Fund, and through private donations. To donate, please follow the link to contact our fiscal sponsor Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture and indicate your contribution for Undocupoets.

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