We are so pleased to announce that the 2025 Dan Lewis Fellow is Worcester’s own Daniel Letona.
Daniel took the WCPA by storm this year, winning the inaugural FoxFest as well as the Lewis Fellowship.
José Daniel Letona Gonzales is a Honduran poet who, after graduating as a graphic designer, moved to the United States to pursue a career in software development. During this journey, he found himself confronting questions of culture and personal identity. In Cambridge, he discovered slam poetry, a medium that ignited a synesthetic exploration of self-discovery and meaning.
Through his poetry, Daniel delves into his cultural roots, memories, and trauma while also highlighting the transformative power of spoken word. He views spoken word as his heritage—a way of preserving knowledge across generations.
About the Fellowship:
After his death, Dan Lewis’s family created an endowment with the Worcester County Poetry Association to support an annual fellowship bequest in his name to provide an aspiring Worcester County poet the means to fulfill a need in that poet’s development that might otherwise go unmet. The 2025 Fellowship award will be $2,500.