In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Willie Perdomo discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for April, which is National Poetry Month, Willie Perdomo. Willie is the author of, most recently, Smoking Lovely: The Remix. Willie, welcome, and thank you for joining me today.

Willie Perdomo: Thank you. I’m really excited to curate this list for National Poetry Month.

Poets.org: And we’re excited to have you. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for April, National Poetry Month?

Perdomo: Yeah, I was very intentional about going after emerging, i.e., young poets, or young, i.e., emerging poets, poets like Gia Shakur, Karla Cordero. There’s so many poets that I had in mind, and I think the shame of it was that I couldn’t include all of them, really. I was intentional about going after poets who were in my youth poetry workshops at Urban Words fifteen years ago, like Gabriel Ramirez and Gia Shakur, or in my VONA workshops from the last fifteen to twenty years. I’m no longer part of the core faculty at VONA, but there were a lot of voices that I recall from those workshops that I wanted to follow up on for this curation. There were poets who understood the relationship between the poem aloud and the poem read.

I think I mentioned poets like Vincent Toro and Carlos Andrés Gómez, those poets who are very good in terms of delivering their poems, what some people might call performing their poems, but also they hold up on the page as well. I was intentional about going after a poet like Mike Tyler, who I remember from the early days of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe—early, early nineties, when the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was still sort of an underground phenomenon. It was a whisper, there was no signage out on the front. And I always thought Michael’s voice was so unique and its irreverence, its approach to irony, its simplicity, and its complexity at the same time. So this was a good time to really solicit poets that I recall having an impact, either hearing them or having read them.

Poets.org: In regard to that relationship between the written poem and the spoken poem, in an essay that you wrote for the Academy just last year, you noted that if you were the principal of a school, you would make the recitation of poetry a mandatory part of—

Perdomo: Oh, yeah.

Poets.org: —the school day. [laughs] So I’m curious, is the recitation of poetry something that you integrate into your classes at Phillips Exeter?

Perdomo: On occasion, yes, I think so. I think more so in my Beats, Rhymes, and Narrative class. And that really looks at the relationship between storytelling and hip- hop. And they really have no choice. I had one student who was petrified, they didn’t want to say their bars out loud. And I said, “No problem.” And I knew what was going to happen when I decided to have him be the ghost writer and have another student perform his bars, and I don’t think he liked the way that student performed those bars. So he took control of his work, and it was such a delight to see the student say, you know what, I’m going to try. I think there’s a relationship between the musicality of verse, whether it’s a hip-hop verse or a line in a sonnet, and the way we hear it as readers and audiences, right?

You can always tell someone who has a signature based on, you know, how they sound. So I think it’s very important to have students recite their work out loud, sometimes even if it’s just prose. I did a phenomenal independent project with a student here for her senior project, and she wrote a book called, a chapbook, the culminating production book from that. It’s called Commonspeak, and you could see her negotiating the sound, the nuance, the charge of her work. While I would ask her, okay, let’s read this passage from this creative nonfiction piece out loud, let’s read this poem out loud. And as soon as she started reading her poetry and her nonfiction, she could see where some of the passages were too long, she could see where maybe we had to move a stanza. So I think, at its core, I think reading aloud is a great editing tool, let alone it being pleasing to the ear.

Poets.org: Agreed. If you could direct our audience to one poem in our collection at Poets.org, or more than one poem that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Perdomo: Oh, “the independence (of puerto rico)” by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. He is just a phenomenal poet and translator to begin with. And this poem sort of galvanizes my sense of pride in being Puerto Rican, my sense of indignation when it comes to the sort of colonized status of the archipelago. There’s one line about smallness that always makes me think about the archipelago, and how we don’t have to subscribe to that. And I don’t think we do in many ways. But this is a poem that I wish I could have included in the curation of the Poem-a-Day, only because of its galvanizing force. And it literally sort of makes me say, yeah, after I read it, it makes me, we call it orgullo, and it makes me, I want to jump out my seat after I read this poem.

Poets.org: And what else are you reading right now?

Perdomo: I’m reading a lot of plays. So I’m a wannabe playwright. I’m even scared to say that out loud, but I’ve been immersing myself in the dramatic form, only because I’m not really able to see as many plays as I want. So I’m reading plays by Amy Herzog and listening to plays, I just listened to Mary Jane. I listened to Guirgis’s, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s work, Lynn Nottage’s work. But I’m also reading On Late Style by [Edward] Said. I’m reading Food Rules by Michael Pollan. So my taste, like, my reading is just all over the place. I’m reading James by Everett, Percival Everett. So it vacillates between reading that I assign, reading that I’m personally interested in, and also targeted reading, vis-à-vis reading plays by playwrights whose ear or who, conceptually, I’m fond of. So that’s really where my reading is right now.

Poets.org: And you’ve already answered my next question about what you’re working on. So I want to talk a little bit more about playwriting. How do you think that your experience on the spoken-word scene, especially at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the early nineties, anticipated this shift to playwriting for you?

Perdomo: That’s a good question. I think there were a few poets who I rocked with back then, namely Dael Orlandersmith, Reg E. Gaines, who subsequently made that leap toward the stage. Dael with one-person shows, Reg E. with Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk that he did with Savion Glover, which I saw at The Public Theater when it first came out. And you could tell that all of us were invested in voices, we were invested in history. For me, it took me a while, even though, if you read Where a Nickel Costs a Dime all the way up to The Crazy Bunch, that there’s a dramaturgical element to these works, there’s a creative sort of narrative arc in these works, there’s always more than one voice at play. And so that step, even albeit a giant step, it seems almost natural for me.

My relationship to the audience when it came to the café was, on the one hand, again, you could sense that there was a community at play. You could sense what was moving the crowd, as we used to say in hip-hop. But I also thought that the relationship to the audience could be dangerous because too much applause could be … it could kill your work if you’re not careful, it could make you complacent. And I think that happened to me early on. So the shift away from that was important. But I understood that even if you’re reading a poem out loud, let alone having a few voices at the same time getting into some sort of conflict, how it can shift the mood of an audience. And that, I never lost sight of.

Poets.org: Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what you are—

Perdomo: So am I! I hope I live to see at least one of these plays get up, so we’ll see. [laughs] We shall see.

Poets.org: Indeed, indeed. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Perdomo: Thank you.

Poets.org: And happy National Poetry Month.

Perdomo: Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation.