We are pleased to announce that Nathan Xavier Osorio has been named the 2025 Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place. He will spend four weeks at Robert Frost’s former farmhouse in Franconia, New Hampshire, this June and July, giving several readings in the area. We hope this opportunity will allow time, space, and inspiration for poetic work.
Nominations were made by Eduardo C. Corral and judged by Professor Vievee Francis, TFP’s Dartmouth Liaison. The finalists were Saba Keramati and Reyes Ramirez, who will each give featured readings as part of the online Poetry Seminar this August.
About Nathan Xavier Osorio
Nathan Xavier Osorio is the son of a Mexican grocer and Nicaraguan nurse. His debut collection of poetry, Querida (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), won the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize selected by Shara McCallum, is a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry, and was selected by Phillip B. Williams as a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award.
He is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver De la Paz as a recipient for the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Chapbook Fellowship and was selected in 2019 as a semi-finalist for 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest. He received his PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Literature with an emphasis in Latin American and Latino Studies and Visual Studies and holds an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. In 2023, he served as the Humanities Institute Public Fellow at the University of California Press and in 2024, he was selected as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine, where he worked with the writer Héctor Tobar on his second project, Tierra Madre.
His work has appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Boston Review, The Notre Dame Review, U.S. LatinX Art Forum, Public Books, The Slowdown, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. He has been invited to give poetry readings and research talks at Hollins University, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Baruch College in New York City, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Foundation. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
On Being Named Our 46th Resident Poet
“I am honored to be the 2025 Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place! My poetry practice feels through and with my surroundings, and I am eager to write alongside the ecologies of Franconia including the Frost Place grounds, the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountains, and the Pemigewasset River. I’m excited about the possibilities of writing collaboratively with an environment that, through the poetry of Robert Frost, has been imagined as iconically American—and using my lyric to link these places with an Americanness marked by Latinidad, diaspora, and immigration. I am also humbled to be joining a storied tradition of incredible writers whose poetry inspires and shapes my own identity as a poet including Rigoberto González, Major Jackson, and Julie Agoos. I can’t wait to share my work with the Dartmouth and Franconia community through public readings and conversations so that we can collectively learn from one another and celebrate the art of poetry. It is a highlight of my writerly life to be able to serve as the Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence and a gift to write at the Frost Place!”
-Nathan Xavier Osorio
Querida
“Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio’s stunning debut, Querida. From the opening, single-sentence tour-de-force of a poem to sonnet-sequences throughout, Osorio’s formal agility and singular voice takes hold of our attention and never lets it go.”
-Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone
A Poem
Praise From Our Judge
“Nathan Xavier Osorio’s work startles us awake, to paraphrase part of a line in Osorio’s telling poem “English as a Second Language.” In reading this author’s work we are encouraged to not simply accept what we think we know but to dive into unexpected imagery (as in the above poem Procession of Flies) stanzas baroque with threads of information, and both hard and subtle turns so we can explore. In this way we are tested, we have to admit this writer is offering a rich tapestry of memory, personal and collective history and revelation that we cannot guess from any headlines. To know is to listen. The polemics of the work are girded by Osorio’s knowledge what language can do, and this work spins our heads round. This is necessary work, and how wonderful to read and hear this intersection of relevance, urgency, empathy and art.”
-Professor Vievee Francis, Dartmouth College
On Process
“Earlier in my writing life, I would be embarrassed about how long it took me to get a poem to a place where I felt comfortable sharing it with others. Now I realize how each piece of writing requires different versions of myself for it to come together. That growth can’t be rushed and develops over periods of time. Patience—like in cooking—is an important writing ingredient for which to develop an awareness. When I return to a poem after some time, I feel changed by something I’ve recently read or an observation or a feeling. Often, that piece of information productively finds its way into the piece, revealing something I hadn’t noticed before.
-Nathan Xavier Osorio, excerpted from Letras Latinas Blog 2.
Repetition is also important to my process. I’ll rewrite a poem by hand a dozen times in a notebook before I take it to the computer. The labor of moving my physical self across the page again and again forces me to slow down and experience the language through my body—it’s meditative. The editing also begins here. Each pass might unveil a changed image or a demand for new sound. This “slow cooking” might lend my writing its density, and surely, it’s helped me become a more patient writer and person.
My writing process for Querida is also indebted to a whole universe of mentors and friends who’ve lent me their time and energy. Sharing work with formal mentors in workshops and classrooms was formative early on, but now informal writing communities have been the generative spaces where I can test new poems and get valuable feedback. People like my wife and fellow writer Kristi D. Osorio or friends like Nicholas Goodly, Christopher Blackman, Michael Juliani, and Anny Mogollón have been providing feedback on Querida for a very long time. In some places, they’re in the poems as much as I am.”
We are grateful for our partnership with Dartmouth College, sponsor of the Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place Program since 2012.
