Poet and editor Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero, Illinois. He earned a BA in creative writing from Columbia College in Chicago. His first collection of poetry, Throwing the Crown (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), was awarded the 2018 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.
Saenz has been an editor at Columbia Poetry Review and an associate editor at RHINO. He works as an acquisitions assistant at the Columbia College library and has read his poetry at a number of Chicago venues. A CantoMundo fellow, he has also been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship.
By Jacob Saenz
As a boy I bicycled the block
w/a brown mop top falling
into a tail bleached blond,
gold-like under golden light,
like colors of Noble Knights
’banging on corners, unconcerned
w/the colors I bore—a shorty
too small to war with, too brown
to be down for the block.
White...
By Jacob Saenz
Today I became King
of the Court w/out a diamond-
encrusted crown thrust upon
my sweaty head. Instead
my markings of royalty
were the t-shirt draping
my body like a robe soaked
in champagne & the pain
in my right knee — a sign
of a battle...
