Santa Fe Art Institute

Julio Cesar Diaz

Julio Cesar Diaz (he/them) is a Centroamericano by way of Salvadoran parents arriving to Houston, Texas. Informed by a Spanish and Queer tongue, Diaz’s poetry explores a dis/locationing of voice through frameworks of (queer) family, synthetic memory, and hyperreal dreaming. They strive to nourish their own translation and archival practices in order to better investigate the un/markings of home and how its residual trail is signposted to, on, or within the physical body (of the page).

Diaz was the recipient of the 2023 Mass MoCA Massachusetts Artist Fellowship and the 2022 Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry. They were also a finalist for the 2023 Outpost Fellowship and the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Diaz has received financial support from the Mass Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Conferences as Translator and Writer, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Juniper Institute, the Speakeasy Project, and others. Their poetry can be found in Proverse Hong Kong: Mingled Voices 7, The Cortland Review, Pleiades Magazine, North American Review, and is forthcoming elsewhere. Diaz is an editor at Poetry Currency and a reader for Frontier Poetry.