Steven Espada Dawson

Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). The son of a Mexican immigrant and originally from East Los Angeles, he is the recipient of a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship.

Dawson’s poems have appeared in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2020 (University of Virginia Press, 2020); Best of the Net; The Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses 2023 Edition; and Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance, edited by Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis (Sarabande Books, 2023).

Dawson has served as poetry editor for both Copper Nickel and Sycamore Review and has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the United States. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate. In 2025, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.