To book Roy for appearances and engagements, including speeches, lectures, readings, conferences, and other similar events, contact The Shipman Agency (or email leslie@theshipmanagency.com).
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Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) is a Honduran poet and scholar. Their first collection, Catrachos, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. Catrachos was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry.
Raised in Miami, Florida, Roy was named a Debut Poet by Poets & Writers Magazine. The recipient of a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2017 they were named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.
Roy is also the recipient of a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative grant and the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Their work has been included in several anthologies.
In 2016, Roy was the recipient of a Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, focusing on issues affecting migrant farm workers in Minnesota. That same year, they were chosen to participate in the fourth Letras Latinas Writers Initiative gathering, sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the MFA Program at Arizona State University. Roy returned to Arizona as a Letras Latinas Scholar in 2018.
Roy participated in the first Poetry Incubator, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary, and was invited to run a workshop during the Incubator's second year. After the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, their poem “Restored Mural for Orlando” was turned into a chapbook with the help of poet and visual artist, D. Allen, to raise funds for the victims. With poet Miguel M. Morales, Roy edited the anthology Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando, published by Damaged Goods Press.
In 2015, they were awarded a GRPP Graduate Research Fellowship to investigate trauma caused by violence in and migration from Honduras. In 2018, Roy was awarded a second GRPP Graduate Research Fellowship to travel to Honduras for research.
Roy holds degrees from the University of Minnesota, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the Honors College at Miami Dade College. They currently live in Minneapolis, where they are pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (track: Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society) at the University of Minnesota, in addition to finishing a young adult (YA) memoir-in-verse, scheduled to come out through Scholastic.
