We all have an origin story we could tell, but for most of us, our stories go untold. Examining and confronting our past and putting into words the experiences that shaped us is challenging. Often, it’s easiest to bury memories.
In Juan Pablo Luzuriaga’s new poetry collection, Cotopaxi Whispers, he takes an unflinching look at his Ecuadorian childhood, immigration to the U.S. at 16, feeling like an outsider, and navigating a new language and norms.
Luzuriaga teaches creative writing at Cuesta College and the California Men’s Colony, and a few of his poems stem from what he’s seen at the prison.
“I was really interested in working with this population,” he explained. “I had this in my mind, and honestly, I was thinking about it so much. It was a privileged thought, but I thought, ‘Maybe if I commit a small crime, I can go in there, write about it a little bit,’ you know?”
Meet the poet, join the community
Juan Pablo Luzuriaga’s new poetry collection, Cotopaxi Whispers released by Blue Light Press, is the winner of the 2026 Blue Light Book Award and peaked at No. 1 in the Diversity & Multicultural Poetry category on Amazon.
He’s having a launch party on Sunday, Oct. 25, at Walker Street, a community space at 1335 Walker St., SLO, from 4 to 7 p.m. Spencer Poulter will do a live art demonstration. Latin fusion band Ancestral Wizards will perform.
Visit amazon.com and other online retailers to purchase a copy of the book.
Thankfully, his desire to work with inmates found him.
“It’s really weird,” he recalled. “A person came up to me and said, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about working in prisons?’ I was like, ‘Are you like tapping into my phone?’ Then this person connected me to working in prison.”
Luzuriaga is fascinated by the inmates’ ability to navigate imprisonment, saying he’d fall into a “deep depression and try to sleep all the time.”
“But, man, they’re working out, and they’re trying to stay busy, and that grind is very inspiring to look at,” he admitted. “I have a rule that I don’t look at anybody’s file. I don’t know anything about anybody. I don’t look up the name. I don’t look up what they’ve done. I wouldn’t be able to work there if I did. If you’ve done something horrible, I’m going to judge you. I’m a human being. Even if I don’t want to do, I’m going to. There’re some crimes where I don’t even want to be near this person, so it’s best not to know.
“I just go in there and it’s about writing. The things that come out of there are really special because the stories they have, you would never hear, but the cool thing is that this space opens, and it’s very vulnerable.”
‘I can drown you in formal language, but why would I do that? My intention is to connect with audiences. I want to show them something real. I want to be as accessible as possible while still maintaining the connection to my roots and my experiences.’
—Juan Pablo Luzuriaga, poet
Luzuriaga’s own vulnerability is on full display in his work, where he explores his experiences with racism, with a mother withholding love, living without documentation in the U.S., and struggling through poverty. But the poems aren’t all distant memories. Every word is colored by the now.
“A Poem for the Brown ICE Agent” is trying to understand why a person of color would do that job.
“I get it. You’re scared like I was/ when I crossed into America undocumented./ You wear a mask, follow orders to aim high—/ a life will fall before it blooms./ I know why your house has no mirrors./ I know why you don’t eat beans before work,” the poem begins.
Luzuriaga draws a comparison to the hard work of roofing, “asphalt melting my boots,” and the allure of easier work and a bonus check, but instead of anger and recrimination, Luzuriaga ends the poem with hope: “Your hand trembles on the trigger,/ your skin remembering another name,/ but before you fire for the first time,/ give up your gun,/ peel off the mask,/ come sit with us,/ rice and beans steaming on the table.”
“It’s so easy to be angry and to hate, but I don’t want that,” Luzuriaga said. “I don’t want my response to be, ‘You know what? I hate these people. Hate them with me.’ I don’t want that.”
Luzuriaga works with 805UndocuFund, so he’s working to protect these vulnerable populations at a time when ICE is snatching people off the street on their way to work. He’s been that vulnerable too. His words speak to the immigrant experience and give his life meaning.
What’s most remarkable about these emotionally charged poems is how utterly accessible they are. Luzuriaga’s bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University was in neuroscience, and his name is attached to several scientific papers on research aimed to find a cure for childhood encephalitis. During COVID, he started to rethink his path. Some family members and people close to him died, and it shook him.
“Would I feel uncomfortable on my deathbed if I hadn’t gone into writing?” he pondered. “That just clicked and I started taking classes at Santa Monica College.”
Soon he got a scholarship and went to UC Merced for his creative writing master’s degree. In other words, he studied formal poetry, and yet, instead of the dense, opaque, and often purposely complex style of academic poetry, his is straightforward.
“I can drown you in formal language, but why would I do that? My intention is to connect with audiences,” Luzuriaga said. “I want to show them something real. I want to be as accessible as possible while still maintaining the connection to my roots and my experiences. I still use words in Spanish, but there’s an invitation for you to connect to the work.”
A rudimentary “been in California long enough to know some Spanish” is enough to get readers through, but Luzuriaga’s collection offers a short glossary of Spanish words, and in many cases, he repeats Spanish phrases in his poems in English.
As for the title, Cotopaxi is a very active volcano in Ecuador, and its rumblings—in Luzuriaga’s case “whispers”—are like the reverberations of his ancestors, the superstitions and magic that shape his culture. The collection’s four sections take the reader on a trip through moments, experiences, and thoughts that shaped the poet. We all have memories, and Luzuriaga’s collection reminds us of our connection to one another. ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Pets 2026.
