WCPA 2023 Annual Meeting

The annual meeting of the Worcester County Poetry Association will be held in the ball room of The Salisbury House, followed by a reading of Worcester’s newest poet laureate Oliver de la Paz.

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board and on the board for Poetry Daily.

A recipient of grants and awards from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Artist Trust, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Poetry, and in anthologies and periodicals such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and in the New York Times. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.