We were lucky to catch up with Isabel Cruz recently and have shared our conversation below.

Isabel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

Art has been a part of my life since I was very young so I feel like some part of me always knew that I’d be doing something creative with my life. I began singing in the church choir and playing the guitar when I was five and I was the youngest member of a band put together by the studio where I took guitar lessons at nine. Throughout elementary and middle school, I maintained a regular schedule singing with various choirs and doing theatre. However, it wasn’t until much more recently that I decided on poetry and writing as my path. You know, I had been playing guitar and writing my own music since I was very little so the transition into poetry was seamless and almost snuck up on me. One day, the melodies fell away and I was starting to fill little address books with short poems. I mostly kept these poems to myself though, still focusing on theatre as my main creative outlet. It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school, when my writing workshop instructor Mr. Flanagan held a National Poetry Month Open Mic in the school gym that I had shared any of my poetry out loud. That was really the inciting moment. My reading at that one event got me involved with the school Literary Magazine and propelled my writing even further. I began hounding Mr. Flanagan (bless his soul and his patience) pretty much every day after school to take a look at my work. That continued all the way through to my Junior Year when I took Creative Writing with him and really started producing work—some of which even made it into my first chapbook. It was also that year that he pushed me to join the YoungWriters USA competition for publication and wouldn’t you know it, my poem “I don’t know how” made it into the anthology. In the fall of that same year, I went to the very first ever Paterson Poetry Festival and performed at the open mic. I met fantastic poets that I am still friends with to this day and that have watched me grow from the 16 year old at the open mic to who I am today. I was completely in awe of the organizer, Paterson Poet Laureate Talena Lachelle Queen, and knew I wanted to be doing what they were doing. A combination of Queen, the Paterson Poetry Festival, and Mr. Flanagan’s influence really pushed me into the poetry world and made me consider pursuing it seriously.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Isabel Cruz. I’m a Puerto Rican poet and playwright from Paterson, NJ. I recently completed my B.A in American Studies and English Creative Writing at Smith College. I truly got my start as a performance poet at venues such as the New York Poetry Festival, the Newark Arts Festival, and the Paterson Poetry Festival. My written work has been awarded several prizes to date including the 2024 Elizabeth Babcock Prize for Best Poem and the 2024 Five College Prose and Poetry Prize for five of my poems. My craft can be situated mostly in the Nuyorican Tradition of Beat Poetry but I find myself more and more marrying the traditional “lyrical” or pastoral (Think your Mary Oliver, Byron, etc) with spoken word influences. I’m probably most proud of the adaptable nature of my work—fluidly switch between English, Spanish, slang; the way my pieces work both on the page and stage; and the wide range of topics in my writing. I’ve written about love, roaches in the microwave, Puerto Rican liberation, Juicy Couture bags, the hair salon as a place for community building, you name it. My work teaching Paterson youth as the 2023 Inaugural Youth Poetry Ambassador to the Paterson Poetry Festival is another great source of pride for me. I also love working with other poets, whether that be one on one reading/writing sessions or teaching group workshops for organizations like the Poetry Society of New York. Bringing inventive topics into spaces that maybe have not considered writing from that specific lens is one of the great joys of getting to run my own workshops. Recently, I’ve found that I thrive with the challenge of a commissioned poem where I have to work within the parameters given to me by the client and have to follow a set timeline. It couldn’t be more disparate from what poetry writing is like most of the time so it produces a different type of work that still matches my own distinct poetic voice—it really forces me to edit, revise, and polish at a much faster pace than I’m used to. Overall, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve accomplished by just 22 years old—finishing my first chapbook and snagging a few prizes being towards the top of that list.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Honestly, financial support is a huge part of what makes art possible. Way back, people were creating insane works of art because patrons were paying for their living expenses on top of the actual work. I think there should be infinitely more artist grants and scholarships that both help further creative work and help artists just pay for the cost of living. From a strictly poetry standpoint, most magazines charge a submission fee to submit to their open calls and prizes. These fees can range anywhere from $3 to $50 and at the volume one has to submit just to get a few acceptances a year, you can spend upwards of a couple hundred dollars. Not to mention door fees—if you’re trying to get your name out there by doing open mics—or workshop fees to help hone your craft (and workshop fees widely vary from $10 to numbers in the thousands). This all goes to say, we should support artists in every way we possibly can. Send your friend’s event or gallery opening flyer to a whole bunch of people. Repost it on your story or social media. Pay the door fee of that event you’re going to when you’re able. Tip your artists. When a project comes up somewhere, throw their name in the hat. As artist funding gets slashed across the country, it’s so incredibly important to support each other and advocate for the vital role artists play in your communities in any way you can.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There are so many rewarding aspects to being a creative, but the most rewarding might be the way I inspire others. When someone comes up to me after a talk, performance, etc and tells me that I’ve inspired them to write or to try poetry again or to think about something they hadn’t thought about before; it truly feels like I’ve accomplished some small part of my purpose in being a poet. Of course, it’s exhilarating to win prizes and see your work being celebrated, but it really pales in comparison to teaching people something new. There are so many parts of our histories that have been—intentionally or unconsciously—relegated to the sidelines and often times people speak on issues about which they are not well informed. That’s why I write so heavily about history and marginalized perspectives because if I can get even one person to research a single line in one of those poems, that’s one more person who has hopefully become more aware and empathetic to whatever cause I may be talking about. Like Claudia Rankine, I’m deeply invested in the idea of the “researchable poem”—a poem that calls on the reader to do the work of understanding the motivating histories behind it—and my American Studies background definitely manifests itself in my poetry in that way.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @eesahvel
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabel-cruz-0116072b3?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
• Other: Publications:
  https://poetrysocietyny.org/isabel-cruz-milk-press-summer-2023
  Performance:
  https://www.youtube.com/live/2-fclS4heMc?si=0s2BFQs-sAwYqzge

Image Credits

Matthew Zeitoun, Cynthia Pagan, Isabel Cruz, Word Seed Inc.