The University of Arizona Press
August 10, 2026
Please join us in celebrating the news that University of Arizona Press author Antonio De Jesús López, San Mateo County’s Poet Laureate, is among the twenty-two poets nationwide who will receive a 2026 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets!
Read the full announcement from the Academy of American Poets.
Antonio De Jesús López is a poet from East Palo Alto, California. He is the 2025–2027 poet laureate of San Mateo County and a former mayor and councilmember of East Palo Alto. He holds a PhD in modern thought and literature from Stanford University and serves as director of research and advocacy at Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS). He is the author of Gentefication and The Right to Remain Violets. His work explores race, public education, state violence, and the afterlives of segregation in American cities.
The Right to Remain Violets is an electrifying poetry collection that reimagines the language of policing, public education, and state surveillance to illuminate the lived realities of Black and Brown youth in East Palo Alto—a city shaped by redlining, freeway expansion, and decades of over-policing. Blending documentary poetics with hip-hop cadence and Catholic liturgy, Antonio De Jesús López transforms transcripts, municipal documents, and legal language into a powerful form of witness. These poems trace how children are drafted into systems of surveillance and criminalization, even as they search for joy and solidarity amid Silicon Valley’s contrasts of wealth and dispossession.
Congratulations to Antonio!
