"Late to the Search Party announces Dawson as a lodestar of contemporary poetry's next generation."
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"The poems in Late to the Search Party stitch together the memories of a family torn apart by circumstance, with threads of beauty, joy, rage and undying love."
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
"Late to the Search Party is an astonishing first book...Vulnerability and craft are inseparable."
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
"There’s a stricken frankness here familiar to those who grieve, and a resilient sweetness guiding us through uneven terrain. I love this lyric; it reminds me how 'light shines through the gristle.'"
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures
About
Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). From East Los Angeles and the son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. He has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.
