Luis Enrique Santos

Luis Enrique Santos is a Puerto Rican poet and educator based in Boston. His work centers queerness, diaspora, and the afterlives of labor and empire, often grounded in the landscapes of Borikén. A 2026 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and recipient of the 2026 St. Botolph Club Foundation Artist Award in Poetry, he has received awards and scholarships from GrubStreet and Brooklyn Poets, and is currently developing a manuscript centered on inheritance, ecological grief, and return. He holds degrees from Boston University and Clark University.

I was born in the mountains of southern Puerto Rico—an emerald valley, a green grassland scorched to ash and tar, where it was commonplace, unspoken, and a queer occurrence for the mountains behind my home to catch fire every other week, in days that seemed like months, sometimes years. I grew up among a lost generation of jíbaros whose fragmented voices live in my blood, shaping a poetics rooted in queerness, diaspora, ecological grief, and the afterlives of colonial violence.

Since 2022, I’ve studied at GrubStreet under poets and mentors like Sam Cha and Mark Kyungsoo Bias, learning to weave lyric precision and compression with lived experience. My poems explore cultural fragmentation, ancestral return, desire, exhaustion, and queer survival, mapped across the unfinished terrain of Puerto Rico’s South.

I’m currently developing my first manuscript, When the Mountains Catch Fire, a collection of poems on dislocation, family, environmental collapse, and the postcolonial apocalypse in Borinkén. These are poems about my mother’s factory work, my brothers continuing the lineage of laborers in the modern age, the slow mornings I watched my grandmother mending the chickens, and my own diasporic distance. The land becomes both archive and elegy; rain, fire, and mountains return as motifs of survival.