Cyrus Cassells

Cyrus Cassells, the 2021–22 poet laureate of Texas, is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022 (Texas Christian University Press, 2025) and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press, 2026). He is the translator from Catalan of To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (2023) and Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (2019). Both volumes, published by Texas A&M University Press, won 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 Parcerisas received honorable mention in the Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation and will appear in 2027. Cassells’s honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the National Poetry Series, an NAACP Image Award nomination, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ Professor of English at Texas State University. (updated 10/2026)

Cassells’s AGNI poem “Elegy with a Gold Cradle” was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2017.