AWP21—Craig Santos Perez

F***ing Shakespeare

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Habitat Threshold. He’s the recipient of many prizes, including the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award. An assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Santos Perez teaches Pacific literature and directs the Creative Writing program there. Also, shout-out to his gorgeous blog.

In this episode, we chat with Craig about his most recent poetry collection, published at the very beginning of the pandemic, which has as its core climate activism and anxieties about the future of the planet his daughters are inheriting. Perez gives his readers great insight into the connection between humans and their environments. In this collection, Perez uses what he coined as ‘recycled form’—taking the form of older poems and inserting his own content into it.

Perez’s Works:

Hacha

Saina

Guma’

Lukao

Undercurrent by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nālani McDougall

Crosscurrent

Honorable Mentions:

Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17

Wallace Stevens’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say