Rosemary Catacalos

Rosemary Catacalos served as Texas State Poet Laureate in 2013 and was the first Latinx person named to the post. Her work often reflects the history, folklore, mythologies, conflicts and gifts of her deeply mixed Greek and Mexican ancestry. Her work has been widely published in high school and college textbooks, and has twice been collected in the annual Best American Poetry anthologies. Catacalos earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship program at Stanford University, and the Texas Institute of Letters/University of Texas at Austin Dobie Paisano program. Her first full-length collection, Again for the First Time, received the 1985 Texas Institute of Letters poetry prize and was reissued by Wings Press in fall 2013 along with a limited edition chapbook of newer poems entitled Begin Again. A former executive director of the San Francisco Poetry Center and Gemini Ink, Catacalos passed away in 2022.