Cyrus Cassells

Cyrus Cassells, the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of eleven books of poetry: including The World That the Shooter Left Us, a Housatonic Book Award finalist; Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, named a Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library; Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022); and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power, forthcoming in 2026, a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada, featuring art by Octavio Quintanilla.

Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas  and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu. Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerias (2026) recently received, in manuscript, Honorable Mention for the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation. Cassells’s honors include the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, the National Poetry Series, two NEA grants, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.