Steven Espada Dawson

Biography

Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). He is the son of a Mexican immigrant and was raised in East Los Angeles. He is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems are printed in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call (2023). He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as the city’s poet laureate.

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James Kreul

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POETRY / Spring 2025

Late to the Search Party

By Steven Espada Dawson

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.