Kyle Carrero Lopez
About
Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest (sample poems here), PARTY LINE, forthcoming Spring 2026 from Graywolf, and serves as Editor for the Poetry Project Newsletter. Born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey, his work centers power, social life, and Afro-Cuban histories, among other subjects. He’s represented by—but not related to—Ashley Lopez at Massie McQuilkin & Altman.
He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. His writing has been highlighted in Best New Poets and Best of the Net; round-ups in W Magazine, Current Affairs, and The Atlantic; and episodes of Poetry Unbound and The Slowdown.
Kyle has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CubaOne Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, NYC Poets Afloat, and NYU, where he was a Goldwater Writing Workshop Fellow, a Provost’s Global Research Initiative Fellow at NYU Berlin, and earned his M.F.A. in Poetry. He was also a 2022 Tin House Scholar.
Selected Publications
Aster(ix) Journal (forthcoming)
“Performance Studies”
Current Affairs (forthcoming)
“I Saw Assata in Havana”
“Anarchic Ode”
Kismet Magazine
The Believer
The New Republic
The Yale Review
Document Journal
“Queer Collectives are Redesigning Dystopia”
Split this Rock
The Offing
“One Day I’ll Run for POTUS, Says the Young Poet”
from “PARTY POLITICS”
Guernica
Poem-a-Day
“Phragmites” (from “PARTY POLITICS”)
“Untitled (Havana, 2000)”
Protean*
“The Red Telephone”
“Memorial to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Vedado, Havana)”
The Poetry Project Newsletter
Author Interview: A Future that Doesn’t End: An Interview with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Review: I Could Not Believe it: the 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear
Review: Customs by Solmaz Sharif
ASTRA
The Atlantic
“Marco Antonio” (from “PARTY POLITICS”)
Three excerpts from “PARTY POLITICS”
“Black Erasure”
Jewish Currents
“Gay Travel (or Music Makes the People Come Together)”
Vulture | New York Magazine**
Two Short Reviews: My Pinup by Hilton Als and Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
Prolit
“Embargo” — Finalist in Black Warrior Review’s 2021 Poetry Contest
TriQuarterly
“Diptych (Headline Heads)”
“Prayer for Yemayá”
HAD***
“Petty”
“Note to Distant Friends”
“Ode to the Crop Top” — featured in an episode of Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama
Frontier Poetry
“Patti Labelle & Celia Cruz (Alma Awards, 1998)”
“RuPaul is Fracking”
Cincinnati Review****
“Rescuing Abuelo (1967)”
“From an Agnostic” — Nominated and chosen for publication in Best of the Net 2020; Nominated for Best New Poets 2020
The Nation
“After Abolition” — Chosen for publication in Best New Poets 2021
POETRY
“Modern Fiction”
“Embargo”
“(slang)uage”
office
“Abstraction in Reverse”
“Dejygea”
“Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet”
“National Times”
*”Memorial to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Vedado, Havana)” was published in print and can be read on Instagram here. “The Red Telephone” was republished in Brooklyn Poets here.
**The review of My Pinup by Hilton Als was published in New York Magazine‘s print issue and can be read on Instagram here.
***”Note to Distant Friends” was recorded for The Poetry Project’s HOUSE PARTY series here and written about in Bending Genres here.
****”Rescuing Abuelo (1967)” was published in print and can be read on Instagram here.
Kyle Carrero Lopez 