Future: Workshops / readings with Mary Szybist and Jay Ward at Lake Norman Charter School, Huntersville, NC — 22 Mar; "Embracing Every Hue" keynote with Kyle Liang, Tiffany Troy, and Darius Phelps at N.Y.U. — 27 Mar; First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum — 4 May; A correspondence with Eric Yip for State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation, edited by Jennifer Wong and Eddie Tay (Out-Spoken Press, 2023)



Present: "This dark is the same dark as when you close," Annus Mirabilis," When Doves," and "Archipelagic" at the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day; "Swarm" at Verse Daily

+ Interviews: with Kaveh Akbar for Divedapper; for The National Book Critics Circle's Small Press Spotlight, a conversation with Rigoberto González and for The Best American Poetry, an extended talk with Sally Wen Mao

+ Audio: "The Push and Pull," an episode of The Moth Radio Hour airing on National Public Radio; "Epithalamion, Ithaka" discussed as part of the Bedtime Stories for the End of the World podcast; "Life Drawing" on Poetry Unbound / On Being with Pádraig Ó Tuama; readings of "Fish Heads" on The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, on Ours Poetica / the Poetry Foundation and on BBC Radio London; for Prac Crit, a launch hosted by Sarah Howe featuring Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Maureen McLane, and Mark Waldron at the LRB; two readings at Berl's—with Aracelis Girmay, Emilia Phillips, and Hossannah Asuncion and with Anne Carson + Robert Currie and Ishion Hutchinson; Episode 22 of the Poetry Says podcast: on "chance, race, and games"

+ Video: for Vintage Poetry, a reading / discussion with Ocean Vuong and Kayo Chingonyi; "You will drown for poems," a film collaboration commissioned for the Dance Film Festival UK; "Mine will be a beautiful service" for P.O.P. / the Academy of American Poets; "In the dead of winter we" with visuals by Jonathan Reyes nominated for a 2015 Webby Award; with AALR A Lettres Fellows—Cathy Linh Che, Eugenia Leigh, and Ocean Vuong—at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Past: The first West Side Fest on the High Line; The Moth - "Great Expectations" Lincoln Center; Writers for Migrant Justice, a benefit event to support Immigrant Families Together; teaching workshops for Poets House, Cave Canem, and the Arvon Foundation; StAnza International Poetry Festival - St. Andrews, Scotland; The Dodge Poetry Festival - Newark, NJ; Open Book Festival - Cape Town, South Africa; readings in Manila (Ateneo de Manila University for Kritika Kultura) and Dumaguete City, Philippines (Silliman U. for The 2nd Literatura Festival); with Jericho Brown and Cathy Park Hong for the Brooklyn Book Festival; The Signet Society at Harvard

R. A. Villanueva is the author of A Holy Dread, winner of the 2024 Alice James Award and Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He is also the winner of the inaugural Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry.


Reliquaria is available now from University of Nebraska Press, independent bookstores such as Greenlight, Books are Magic, McNally Jackson, Skylight Books, and Bookshop.org and Amazon. In Europe and the United Kingdom, Reliquaria can be ordered via Combined Academic Publishers and The American Book Center; in London, Reliquaria can be found at the National Poetry Library / Southbank Centre, Libreria, and the London Review Bookshop.

From Kenji Liu's review of Reliquaria: "In a time when sustained engagement with a text seems to be devalued, this collection is one to read not just for pleasure, but also for intellectual sustenance." Fiona Moore adds: "I've kept [Reliquaria] around for several months now, enjoying rereads of various poems for their richness of language, form and metaphysical thought." And in his review, Ron Slate begins: "at once elegiac and celebratory, [Reliquaria is] dense with acutely perceived life."


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New writing appears—or is forthcoming—in Poetry London, The Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, Iterant, Ambit, The Poetry Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, The Rialto, Guernica, the American Poetry Review, Prac Crit, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Common, The Margins, and wildness.

Poetry, prose, and ideas have previously been featured in Oxford Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, Bellevue Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Collagist, The Literary Review, Lantern Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

He is a recipient of honors and fellowships from the Forward Prizes, Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and The Asian American Literary Review; his work has also been anthologized in Read Ritual: An Anthology, Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. He holds graduate degrees from Rutgers University and New York University.


Born in New Jersey, he lives in Brooklyn.