ABOUT MYSELF :: SOBRE MÍ MISMO

Julio Cesar Diaz is a Texas-born Centroamericano poet living in Western Massachusetts. He’s a left-handed gay Capricorn who uses he/them pronouns.

If Julio Cesar isn’t watching disaster films, he is dreaming of endless things. His recent dreams consist of

• living out a (not so) stable life in a fantasy/romance queer novel,

• surviving two incoming tsunamis,

• learning magic theory by crafting poems,

• and officiating a gay wedding in a giant treehouse.

Julio Cesar’s work is an inquiry into aspects of voice-ful/less-ness or how voice is (with)held in the host’s body and how well it fractures, as survival instinct, in response to the strains of family, faulty memories, and dreams of alternative selves.

As a bilingual gay poet, he uses skills from translation and archival studies in his work to investigate what constitutes home for people constantly under threat and borders and how home is signaled to, on, or within the physical body (of the page.)

Julio Cesar is the recipient of a 2023 Mass MoCA Massachusetts Artist Fellowship and the 2022 Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry. He was also a finalist for the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize and an honorable mention in the 2018 Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets Prize.

He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Conferences as Translator and Writer, Palm Beach Festival, the Juniper Institute, and the Speakeasy Project.

His work has been published in The Cortland Review, Pleiades Magazine, North American Review, Southword Journal, Barrio Writers, and is forthcoming elsewhere.

Julio Cesar earned his B.A. at the University of Texas at Austin and his M.F.A from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he works as a lecturer.