Francisco X. Alarcón

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Alarcón decided to begin writing poems for children in the 1990s, when he “became aware that there were almost no books of bilingual poems children written by any Latino poet in the United States,” and decided to write his own collection, entitled Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems. Alarcón’s poems for children are minimalist and airy, and often presented in bilingual editions—having been raised in both the US and Mexico, he wrote in English, Spanish and Nahuatl, and he described himself as a “binational, bicultural, and a bilingual writer.” He also taught poetry to children, and said that “children from the third grade to the sixth grade are truly excellent natural poets,” which seems irrefutably true.