Suzi F. Garcia

The daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, Suzi F. Garcia is a queer, disabled poet and editor raised in Arkansas. Garcia struggled with reading as a child. not learning how until the third grade—but, as her parents were fans of free air conditioning and free entertainment, she spent much of her youth at the library. She recalls finding a collection of poems by the English romantic poet William Wordsworth when she was 10 years old and the weeks-long effort she spent trying to decipher his work. What Wordsworth spoke of the pastoral and philosophy did not meld with what she knew of life and language, and the collection scared her off of poetry so much it would be nearly a decade before she read another poem. She would realize later, though, that she had grown up with poetry the whole time. Garcia describes being a child listening to her Peruvian father tell her tales of distant family and inherited legends from his culture, with the beauty of blended languages and bicultural experiences making way for the first poetry that truly spoke to her. She now loves Wordsworth and Shakespeare, but it was things like the language of folklore and the unique country diction of her mother that first opened her to the world of poetry and would inspire her personal style and thematic focuses. Garcia is the online editor for the Michigan Quarterly Review and an executive editor at Noemi Press. Her favorite film and book series is The Wizard of Oz, which inspired her debut chapbook A Homegrown Fairytale (2020), a collection of poems centered around the character Dorothy Gale.