Exploring the Literary Life of Houston Poet Laureate Reyes Ramirez

Image: Michael Starghill

Reyes Ramirez’s road to being named Houston Poet Laureate in 2025 started with a gift to his mother. He doesn’t remember whether it was for her birthday or Mother’s Day, only that he was in high school and spontaneously wrote her a poem. “Being the great mother that she is, she loved it, even though it was a bad poem,” he says. “I rhymed ‘good’ with ‘food.’”

The validation felt invigorating. Writing became a hobby for the young Ramirez; the possibility of making it his life’s work didn’t occur to him until he was in his early 20s, studying as an undergraduate at University of Houston. This was how he began developing his warmhearted, heavily sensory voice, prominent in works like “Pupusas” and “Selena’s Last Concert in Houston.” Many of Ramirez’s poems and stories pay homage to his Mexican and Salvadoran heritage, and the genuine care and passion he has for his cultures make for an immersive reading experience, perfect for an evening read in a soft chair, blanket on lap, and hot drink in hand. It’s easy to see why he was chosen to represent Houston’s poetry scene.

Originally, Ramirez set out to work in journalism but claims he “was too lazy” for the career path. Creative writing offered a much more agreeable pace for his working style, as he could complete poems and short stories when inspiration struck rather than being beholden to an editorial calendar. “Poetry lets me explore a truth. Fiction lets me play with the truth, and nonfiction allows me to deconstruct the truth,” he says. “If I have an idea in mind or a project in mind, I have to think about what form it will be best in.”

Throughout college and a subsequent move to San Marcos to attend graduate school at Texas State University, Ramirez worked with arts nonprofits and on political campaigns (his first was Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid while still in high school). He continued writing poetry and stories on the side and, after completing his MFA in creative writing, made a move to Austin. But Ramirez missed home. “The distance from it made me appreciate Houston,” he says, noting he was “inspired by it with literature and writing and poetry.”

After moving back, Ramirez held positions at DiverseWorks, Houston Community College, and other local arts organizations. In 2022, he published his first collection of short stories, *The Book of Wanderers, *with the University of Arizona Press, earning him finalist honors in the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Awards and an honorable mention in the short story and anthology category for the Eric Hoffer Award for Adult Fiction. Stories in his debut follow people of Mexican and/or Salvadoran heritage across time. They explore the Gulf Coast's past and navigate its possible futures. It’s a meditative journey that led to accolades with NPR and the Latin American Review of Books. “Fiction…lets you play with the truth, in that you get to prolong the narrative and take it wherever you want to go, and you can put it in different contexts and mediums and see what happens,” Ramirez says.

El Rey of Gold Teeth followed with Hub City Press in 2023, which amassed even more literary praise. Ramirez was named a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and two years later, the City of Houston (COH) and Houston Public Library (HPL) honored him as the 2025–2027 Poet Laureate of Houston. He says it took three applications to clinch the title. Now, he travels across Houston to schools and other institutions, sharing his love of the written word, teaching poetry workshops, and completing a larger capstone project—an anthology celebrating Houston’s greatest masters of meter. This helps promote local talent in a more centralized, accessible way, while also allowing Ramirez to illustrate how no poet writes in a vacuum. He is shaped just as much by the city and fellow creatives within its bounds as his own interiority. “As poet laureate of the City of Houston, I think it’s one of my jobs to show the context in which I'm practicing,” Ramirez says.

Image: Michael Starghill

The role itself has been “both hard and easy,” he says, noting that the city’s sprawling nature is both its strength and its weakness when it comes to knowing all there is to know about the local poetry scene. Neither the city nor the Houston library requires Ramirez to make public appearances, but being the poet laureate means receiving invitations to more events than his schedule allows, even though he wishes he could attend them all. “It’s easy because there’s so much going on in Houston. There’s so much amazing poetry, and some of the best poets in the world are here,” he says. “But that’s also the hard part… You can’t really know everyone. The city is just impossibly huge.”

Despite his title, Ramirez’s portfolio extends beyond poetry and includes short fiction, art criticism, creative nonfiction, and more. He’s even contributed to Houstonia. Working in different forms and languages exercises different parts of his brain. “Poetry, obviously, can let you play with the language at the atomic level, make decisions that would be frowned upon in creative nonfiction or fiction,” he says. “…Poetry gives a lot more patience for the reader to engage with the most ridiculous of ideas.” And speculative fiction opens up opportunities to pore over “an idea or concept until the wheels fall off.”

For example, Ramirez uses science fiction as a means to reflect on how today’s social inequities would manifest in the future if left unaddressed. “We provide children in this country with very different circumstances and experiences, especially children of color,” he says. “…If we colonize Mars, we probably would institute just as ridiculous immigration standards [there]. If one day we have robot suits, yes, it will probably be the young who will have to bear that burden in terms of wearing those suits to fight wars.”

Beyond the written word, he’s been branching out into art curation. The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids, a bilingual, digitally based exhibition, brings together local artists of color who use gridlines to reclaim narratives and recenter their own lives and experiences. To Ramirez, visual art and writing influence and inform one another; they’re overlapping disciplines, never siloed. “I try to play in all those genres and languages, but that language also includes the visual language. And just like how a certain word will mean something, so will a certain color,” he says. “And so, to me, art is visual language… Maybe we’re talking about the same things, but in different ways.”

Involvement with the arts offers another way for Ramirez to get out and meet other professional creatives in the Houston area. While he laments his inability to be everywhere and do everything, he finds communion with the dreamers and the doers, because they are providing exactly what the world needs right now to heal itself. “There’s a lot of awful things happening, but there’s also a lot of great people doing great things, who are bringing together people just to tell stories and nerd out on language and literature,” Ramirez says. “That’s one thing that’s kind of missing from a lot of depictions of contemporary life, is that people are still doing that work.” And sometimes, that work begins with showing mom just how much you love her.