When Janine Joseph called fellow poet Esther Lin one afternoon in March 2017 to give her the good news that she had been awarded a $500 Undocupoets fellowship, one of three annual grants given to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States, neither expected the conversation to last long. Instead they talked for an hour about their shared experiences dealing with the challenges of living undocumented in the United States. “We had the same joy, surprise, and awe at being able to get on a phone call and not know each other but then know so much already about each other’s lives,” Joseph says.
The Undocupoets had started two years earlier as a literary advocacy campaign. A decade ago “every major poetry prize in the country required some form of residency or citizenship or DACA status, and that was perfectly ordinary,” says poet and memoirist Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. In 2015 he and two other writers circulated a petition challenging eight prestigious poetry contests to change their policies requiring specific immigration status for all submitting writers. More than four hundred poets, publishers, and academics signed on. Eventually all eight contests changed their guidelines to be more inclusive, prompting many other presses and awards programs to follow suit.
The Undocupoets “made it possible for people to see us as a whole meaningful set of voices in American poetry,” says 2021 fellow Tobi Kassim. Now, in the context of “the biggest immigration crackdown since Eisenhower tried to ship people back to their home countries in the 1950s, being able to actually speak for ourselves as immigrants in the mediascape is super important,” Kassim adds. And as it has continued to connect writers like Joseph and Lin to one another, what started as a campaign for literary inclusivity has grown into something more: a community, a set of poetics, and a movement for turbulent times.
In the decade since the Undocupoets campaign began, Castillo’s original co-organizers, Christopher Soto and Javier Zamora, have stepped away. First Joseph and then Lin took on leadership roles in their place, helping navigate the unique challenges that come with serving their community.
For example, the Undocupoets fellowship award remains at $500 despite the slow burn of inflation, a fact that sometimes draws questions and criticism. “But we’re thinking about what amount we can grant someone before they have to report it to the IRS,” Joseph says. So she and her co-organizers seek to offer experiences in lieu of cash: conferences, workshops, or publication opportunities, such as in the June 2024 folio Lin curated for the Rumpus or the issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review that Castillo is guest-editing this year.
And whenever the three choose new fellows, they reach out by phone before making the announcement. Do the winners want their names or photos to be associated with the fellowship publicly or even within the community? The organizers are mindful that the citizenship status of participants and their families can make otherwise mundane publicity decisions—including identifying which poets’ achievements to highlight for this article—particularly fraught. “Other organizations don’t have that component of not just precarity, but outright danger,” Castillo says.
Even with the stakes so high, each new cohort brings unexpected communion among strangers. Kassim “never imagined that there were more than two poets who were trying to navigate immigration status and poetry, like me,” he says. Then he got a call from Lin, whose praise for and effortless understanding of his work was profoundly meaningful. “Whenever someone who shares this very deep and formative aspect of life with you also finds your work exciting, it’s really galvanizing,” he says, and it gives him courage to share details of his life in a way he previously found daunting.
These themes—the existential peril of self-disclosure and the pleasure and power of unexpectedly finding others like you—are constants in Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose From the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial, 2024), an Undocupoets-curated anthology featuring fifty-three writers who have been impacted by the U.S. immigration apparatus. Within those pages, Lin, Castillo, and Joseph see the beginnings of something bigger: a “poetics” of undocumented verse. Some contributors write in a way Lin describes as “wonderfully surreal,” in order to address trauma. Others are bold, almost pugnacious in their narratives. And many write with a self-consciousness that regards the reader with wariness—asking, as Joseph puts it, “Are you going to report me, or are you in on this with me?”
Ten years on, Castillo says, Undocupoets’ central question remains the same: “Should citizenship matter in terms of artistic expression?” Some days it seems like the arts establishment’s answer is shifting. In 2023, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced it would expand eligibility for some of its prizes to include writers who are “permanent residents of the United States, or if the United States has been their longtime primary home.” Arts organizations regularly approach the Undocupoets for help shaping their policies. And in the past decade, multiple books written by fellows have been published through contests whose guidelines would once have excluded them—even if it is still dangerous to name exactly which books those are.
But change isn’t always linear. In that time deportations have continued regardless of who is in the White House. Plenty of submission guidelines remain exclusionary, and there are even examples of organizations that reverted to older language. “The onus really has to be on these organizations, rather than us having to continually put their feet to the fire,” Castillo says.
Amid the current administration’s mass deportation threats and anti-immigrant messaging, he would much rather spend time building community. The anthology brought an influx of new writers into the Undocupoets’ orbit, and Castillo and his co-organizers have been welcoming them with internal workshops, community meetings, and writing nights. “The same way elephants turn and surround their calves, we’re trying to surround our people and let us all see one another face to face,” Lin says. So rather than shuttering the website or cancelling fellowships, the Undocupoets plan to push resolutely forward with their work, connecting new cohorts with a community they only dreamed might exist and building a bulwark of belonging against whatever difficulties are to come.
Alissa Greenberg is an independent journalist based in Boston and Berkeley, California, who reports at the intersection of science, history, and culture. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.