Ruben Quesada is a poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of Revelations (2018) and Next Extinct Mammal (2011), and editor of the award-winning, landmark anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2023). His early translations of Luis Cernuda in Exiled from the Throne of Night (2008) was published as a limited-edition print. His writing appears in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Orion Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere in print and online. His poetry collection, Brutal Companion (2024), won the Barrow Street Editors Prize and was recognized as A Notable Book of 2024 by the University of California. In 2025, Goodman Theater commissioned him to write a poem for the premiere of Jordan Harrison's The Antiquities.
Quesada holds a Ph.D. in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. He has taught poetry, creative nonfiction, literature, writing and publishing at institutions including Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, UCLA Writers Program, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has received fellowships and grants from the American Literary Translators Association, the Jentel Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council.
Quesada is the founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus and has been active in supporting queer and Latinx communities in literary spaces for more than a decade. He co-founded the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize, conceived to honor the role of transoceanic friendship in poet Federico García Lorca’s life, work, and legacy by introducing emergent Latinx poets to international audiences. He has served on editorial boards and grant panels for national literary organizations and regularly appears at literary festivals, conferences, and universities as a speaker and moderator.