Ariel Francisco | Glass Poetry Press

Ariel Francisco (Before Snowfall, After Rain and Every Morning Now I Wake Up With a Mouth Full of Blood) is a first generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. He is currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is the editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine and also the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere.

"[T]he question becomes what entry-point will manifest for the reader? The onset? The ending? The return? The point of no return (if there is one)? The Statue [of Liberty], diminished and stripped of projections, becomes (I think) a symbol of realization rather than just recognition. So I suppose the real question in the end, in terms of the voyage, is where do we go from there?"

— in conversation with Christopher Kondrich, Tupelo Quarterly