15 Poetry Collections by Latina Writers Coming Out in 2024

National Poetry Month is a time of year when we celebrate all things poetry throughout the month of April. But, of course, the celebration tends to favor dead, white poets instead of living Latina poets from our community. Latinas in poetry is nothing new and this month we wanted to celebrate the collections coming out this year. That’s why we decided to put together a round-up of poetry collections that are coming out from the Latina poetry community. It’s important for our voices to be uplifted and centered in these spaces that have historically erased and/or downplayed our stories. This month and every month, we need to be diversifying the voices on our TBR lists this year. This is by no means an exhaustive list but is a good starting place as you place your pre-orders and put together your reading lists. Read on to learn more about 15 poetry collections by Latina poets that we’re excited to read in 2024.

The Eaters of Flowers by Ire’ne Lara Silva 

Release Date: January 15, 2024

The Eaters of Flowers by Ire’ne Lara Silva is the Chicana poet’s third book of poems following her popular collections Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song. In this new read, Silva explores recent changes in her life including the loss of her brother, who was in many ways her adopted son. Using her trademark canto style and heartfelt language, she creates a powerful portrait of grief, starting from his death and following her journey through grief, loss, and loneliness. But throughout, there is inexplicable love and joy as she takes a step forward and begins to re-assemble her life. She has also published a collection of short stories entitled flesh to bone.

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater by Irma Pineda

Release Date: January 16, 2024

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater by Irma Pineda is her 12th collection of poetry. An Isthmus Zapotec poet and professor, Pineda uses this collection to tell a story of separation and displacement through the eyes of two different narrators. One is a person who has migrated to the U.S. without papers in an effort to find work and change their circumstances. Meanwhile, the other is their partner who waits at home in southern Mexico for their return. This is currently her second body of work to be translated into English by translator Wendy Call after In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (2022).

Dear Lo by Brady Bove

Release Date: February 12, 2024

Dear Lo by Brady Bove, who is of Puerto Rican descent, is her second book of poetry after her debut A Day of Humanity (2020). In this new release, she puts together a collection of modern epistles, somewhat like prayers, as a way to capture the difficulties of moving to a new place and forming meaningful relationships with others along the way. Doing so, she touches on themes of loneliness, peace, and bravery with tenderness and vulnerability. However, she ultimately discovers that being alone doesn’t always mean lonely and that hope, against all odds, can actually lead to healing and community.

Makeshift Altar by Amy M. Alvarez

Release Date: March 1, 2024

Makeshift Altar is author Amy M. Alvarez’s debut poetry collection which explores the Afro-Caribbean and African American diasporas through cultural, spiritual, and place-based experiences. Born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents, she takes us on a journey throughout her life-long search for home, existence, self-discovery, and identity as a multicultural American. Written with musicality, song, and carefully tuned rhythm, she attempts to show the connections between the past and present and trace her ancestry as a Black Latina. Throughout the book, she also touches on important themes including environment, family, migration, colonialism, displacement, and who we become when we are when shaped by our choices and larger powers.

PINION by Monica Rico  

Release Date: March 15, 2024

PINION by Monica Rico is the Mexican American poet’s debut collection that touches on several different topics including womanhood, patriarchy, love, grief, and memory. The book explores how love can allow memories to linger, make us aware of absence, and bring us closer to home. The title. itself is in reference to the Spanish word for a bird’s outer flight feathers as a noun and the verb for binding or severing the wing to stop them from flying. Throughout the book, Rico deconstructs this relationship, representing different members of her world as birds as a kind of bird encyclopedia: her grandfather as an owl, her grandmother as a robin, and America as the eagle’s warped beak and surveilling eye. Ultimately, this is a dual personal history and a call for the end of global capitalism as we know it.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World by Ada Limón

Release Date: April 2, 2024

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World is an anthology edited and introduced by Ada Limón, who is the first Chicana to serve as the U.S. Poet Laureate. Following a history of romantic “nature poetry” written by white men, this collection is made up of 50 previously unpublished poems from a curated selection of contemporary writers of color including Joy Harjo, Jericho Brown, Paul Tran, and more. Each poet speaks on their own local landscape, from national parks to trees growing beside a bus stop. Written with intimacy and timeless beauty, this is an ode to how our planet is changing and how we relate to the land we live on.

The Blue Mimes by Sara Daniele River

Release Date: April 2, 2024

The Blue Mimes is an award-winning debut collection from Cuban and Peruvian writer Sara Daniele River. Spanning time from the 2016 presidential election to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as places between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, the book captures and explores themes of home, landscape, loss, grief, and love. In this way, she tries to memorialize lost loved ones, remember those still living, and mourn the larger ways we have lost our sense of connection to one another, our own safety, and assurance that we’re doing the right thing. Throughout the book, she uses a blend of English and Spanish to create a unique rhythm and pattern with her words and uses Spanglish to take us to deserts, coastlines, and cities, reassuring us that even in times of uncertainty, there is a sense of hope and resolve to hold onto.  

Quererme en La Luz by Farrah Fang

Release Date: April 15, 2024

Quererme en La Luz by Farrah Fang is the story of a trans Latina navigating life on the gulf coast of Texas. Part unapologetic journey, part spiritual philosophy, part militant manifesto, part harmonious and chaotic retelling, Fang reflects on themes of fluidity, divinity, and trans womanhood. While there are so many reasons to be afraid of this dangerous world, she ultimately concludes that there are even more reasons to be in awe of its wonders and beauty.

La Niña de Mis Ojos by Paola Gutierrez 

Release Date: April 16, 2024

La Niña de Mis Ojos by preschool teacher and poet Paola Gutierrez is a Spanish-language poetry collection that is a love letter to the past and to her beloved grandfather Papito José. In these poems, she describes him as a brave, loving, compassionate, and hardworking man who taught her many lessons about what it means to be honest, strong, grateful, and resilient. Even with the existence of international policies, politics, and borders, she explores how his teachings are always present in her life. Written with vulnerability and heartfelt tenderness, this is a loving portrait to a family member and the legacy our ancestors leave behind.

Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal

Release Date: May 28, 2024

Watcha is a multi-genre hybrid collection of work by Mexican and Chicana poet Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal. Blending together language, words, and visuals, Villarreal uses free verse, ekphrastic poetry, photographs, and prosaic gestures to create a gallery of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous art. In this way, the reader becomes a spectator in a space that combines prose with art, English with Spanish, political life with personal history. Compiled with care and intention, she powerfully explores themes of belonging, memory, and death, ultimately asking us all to look at the world in a different way.

Kinds of Grace by Jennifer Maritza McCauley 

Release Date: May 2024

Kinds of Grace by Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a poetry collection that explores the intersections between Blackness and Afro-Latinidad. Born to an African American father and Puerto Rican mother, McCauley details the trials and triumphs of her life, from mental health issues to the search for love, from the journey to find home to her desire to achieve self-ownership. This a story about what can happen when we work toward healing our racial wounds, discovering our womanhood, and giving ourselves grace at every turn in our lives.

Good Monster by Diannely Antigua

Release Date: May 2024

Good Monster by Dominican American poet Diannely Antigua is her second collection of poetry after her debut Ugly Music. In this new book, she explores the chronic pain and traumas that she’s experienced throughout her life: a stepfather’s abuse, a mother’s subtle harm, her own anxiety and depression. Caught between crisis, shame, and hope, she also reckons with her fallout with faith and deepest waves of despair. Told through a collection of sestinas, episodic sonnets, and diary entries, she transforms her personal journals into collages as a way of finding the resilient desire to find love, feel pleasure, and keep on living.

Fabulosa by Karen Rigby

Release Date: June 10, 2024

Born in Panama, Karen Rigby has returned to the poetry world with her second collection Fabulosa, 12 years after publishing her debut Chinoiserie. Shimmering and seductive, the poems in this book – which range in style from poeticas to ekphrastics – are in open conversations with a wide array of characters including Dior, Endeavour Morse, and Hieronymus Bosch. Over the course of the book, the pieces glitter like diamonds and silver and explore her interests in cinema, fashion, and feminism. She channels the title’s feeling of fabulousness and glamor with ease and grace.

Las Piedrecitas by Noelia Cerna

Release Date: June 2024

Written in both English and Spanish, Las Piedrecitas by Noelia Cerna documents the poet’s childhood and Nicaraguan heritage, uplifting the images of brown bodies and immigrant hands hardened by work. More than just struggle, however, she ensures to center hope, redemption, and survival even when touching on topics of gender roles, addiction, domestic violence, familial estrangement, and racism. Without warbling, flinching, or folding, this collection reminds the reader how important it is to refuse to break or stay silent, and instead to stay strong and resilient.

Left Turns in Brown Study by Sandra Ruiz 

Release Date: August 2, 2024

Left Turns in Brown Study by Sandra Ruiz  weaves together poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes, drawing on Black and brown activism and theory. This project seeks to understand how Brownness harbors loss, suffering, and new ways of living, inviting the reader to engage with the sounds, phrases, and principles of anti-colonial ways of absorbing and disseminating information. Along the way, both she and the reader run into ghosts and spectral presences in the form of deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and victims of institutional and colonial violence. This is a transformative, chameleon-like work that seeks to explore utopia, queerness, and the sacredness of brown life.