Left to right: Houston Poet Laureate Reyes Ramirez, HPL Deputy Assistant Director for Communications LaDonna Weems.
Reyes Ramirez was announced as Houston's new (2025-2027) Poet Laureate last week, and HPL's own LaDonna Weems had a chance to interview him at his inaugural reception. Read on to learn more about Reyes and what he's all about!
LaDonna Weems: What does being appointed Poet Laureate mean to you personally and artistically?
Reyes Ramirez: It certifies my belief that any good poet is a member of a community, an active member of their community. Because poetry of that community isn't just words on a page, it's when you put it in conversation with the community, with the people, that it takes meaning. I get to represent the city not only that I'm proud of, but I've been in conversation, and it's taught me so many things. I now therefore get to give it what it's given me in return. It's not only an esteemed honor, but it's a way to elevate my craft, and be more in conversation with the communities and people of Houston. As a poet, it astounds me to even put into words what it means to get to represent Houston, the grandest city of Houston, and get not only Houstonians to be excited about poetry, but to be excited about themselves, to be excited about our history, to be excited about the words we use, our language, and how we can be in conversation with each other. And I think that's what's going to take me to the next level. Everything that I've grown from up to this point will be in service to that.
LW: What themes and issues do you want to explore and highlight during your tenure?
RR: I want to show how amazing the city of Houston is for art, because Houston itself is a juncture of all sorts of diasporas, of cultures, of peoples that are talking to each other just so casually. I want to highlight how Houston incorporates histories of the South, of the borderlands, of the Southwest, of the West, of the urban, of the rural, of farms, of city skyscrapers. All these things are in conversation with each other. I want to show how Houston not only is a major point of literature for Texas and the United States, but the world, because we host so many different people from so many different cultures and countries and languages.
LW: That's a beautiful answer. It actually leads me to my next question. How do you envision connecting poetry with communities that may feel distanced from it?
RR: One way that I think this role can really connect people more so to poetry if they don't feel part of it is that whether they mean to or not, we're all navigating poetry. We're all talking to each other. We're all navigating the reality which we live in. And language is how we do that. We talk to each other. We may not be able to talk to each other, but we still communicate. Whether it be you're driving your car and you have to honk, or you have to go to the restaurant and you order something. Each of these things are different lines of a poem. If I as a poet can make a metaphor, it's that each thing that we speak or each thing that we do is another line in that poem that is our life. For people it's to understand that whether they want to or not, they're engaging in poetry. They're creating new stories. They're creating new ways of speaking, of being, of being with each other. If you walk into anyone's house, that in itself is a curation, right? The things that you keep, the things that you maintain, the practices that you forget or the practices that you recover. As Houstonians, there are many reasons why we may have lost things. But as Houstonians, there is a reason why we keep so many things, why we keep being proud, why we keep helping each other in our times of need. And it's because truly, not only do we believe in each other's humanity, but I think poetry is a way to say that.
LW: Are there any specific projects or initiatives you plan to launch as Laureate?
RR: Not only am I excited to do the required workshops—I casually teach workshops in the community for various topics and practices, so I'm excited to do that on behalf of the City. I'm also excited to launch an archive that is both virtual and in-person, a collection of Houston poets not only that I know, but the ones that I don't know. What I'm most excited about is to learn and talk to poets who I don't even know. The city of Houston is the fourth largest city in America, gearing up to be the third. It's both scary and exciting to know that there are people I haven't even met who are writing poetry, who are contributing to the language that I'm trying to contribute to. This archive, this collection of Houston poets is going to allow us to be in conversation with each other, to share practices and to incorporate people who, again, maybe won't see themselves as part of poetry, but they keep their families as histories and their stories alive through stories. That's what I want to collect. That's what I want all of us to be proud of.
LW: During your acceptance speech, you mentioned the project of being able to name thirty poets in Houston, so I think that's an amazing ambition. Lastly, who are some poets, past and present, who inspire your work and vision?
RR: That's always the trickiest question. I'm proud to come from not only a lineage of practitioners of arts, but of laborers; of workers, of people who build things, but also people who write things. My mom is kind of like a secret writer. She's always been a writer, but she's never published anything, never wanted to. She inspires me. In terms of named people, growing up I read a lot of Eduardo C. Corral, he's, I believe from Arizona. He taught me a lot of how to navigate languages and suppressed languages and languages we don't even know, realizing that we speak so many languages that we're not even aware of. And yet here we are, speaking them. Roberto Gonzalez, he's a mentor to me who helped publish my first book. In terms of the City of Houston, there's just so many that I'm excited to put in a different context, whether it be Lupe Mendez, who has shown me to be a gracious person in public as a poet, as someone in public who speaks to so many different people. Debra D.E.E.P. Mouton: I served on the committee to help pick her as Houston Poet Laureate, and that's been a point of pride in my life. To always read her work and be like wow, I had a moment in that, even just for so little. I'm extremely proud of that and I'm inspired by her so much.