Rodney Gómez

Rodney Gómez is a poet and an urbanist whose work explores the intersections of the natural and built environments, culture, and history in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, he is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and served as the 2020–2021 McAllen, Texas, poet laureate. 

Gómez is the author of the collections Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for best book of poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, and a finalist for the Balcones Prize; Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020), winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series; Ceremony of Sand (YesYes Books, 2019); Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018); and Mouth Filled with Night (Northwestern University Press, 2014), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. 

His work has been published in Poetry, New England Review, the Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, North American Review, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and other journals. He has received support from an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Yale RITM Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellowship, and a grant from the de Groot Foundation.

Gómez serves as advisory editor for FlowerSong Press and a board member of Newfound. He lives with his partner and children in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas.