Oliver de la Paz

Poet Oliver de la Paz was born in the Philippines and raised in Ontario, Oregon. He earned a BA in English and a BS in biology from Loyola Marymount University and an MFA from Arizona State University. His collections of poetry include Names Above Houses (2001), which won the Crab Orchard Award, Furious Lullaby (2007), Requiem for the Orchard (2010), chosen by Martín Espada for the Akron Prize, and Post-Subject: A Fable (2014). Espada described Paz’s cinematic free-verse poems as “the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it.”
 
With Stacey Lynn Brown, Paz coedited the anthology A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems (2012). He is co-chair of the advisory board of Kundiman, an organization devoted to promoting Asian American writers and writing, and serves on the board for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. His honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust. He teaches at Holy Cross and in the Rainer Writing Workshops.