C.T. Salazar

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) was named a 2023 finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award. His poems have most recently appeared in Poem-a-Day, Cincinnati Review, West Branch, Denver Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. C.T. is an assistant professor at Delta State University where he serves as director of university archives and museums.

Artist Statement

In my writing I’ve come to know the ways I shape and am shaped by the South; how the Mississippi delta is a geography of ongoing extractions intentioned by racial capitalism. A territorialized resolution to a crisis. The lyric offers a way to articulate a response that’s physical, political, and spiritual to a landscape that’s also physical, political, and spiritual. Above all I hope the folks in my community see themselves in my work, and that I’m always speaking with a voice legible to them first. The ways in which I hear the Mississippi delta discussed have a strange air of inevitability that poetry lets us disrupt and repurpose—everything we’ve been through and everything we’re going through. We recognize our neighbors across borders and how arbitrary the drawn lines are in this global moment of empire. How the powers at be actually connect and collapse all our geographies while convincing us some great distance separates our suffering. To write in the Mississippi delta is to write at the plantation in the heart of imperialism. We are in otherwise uninhabited territory, repurposing the raw materials of a reality not built or meant to sustain our livelihood and the poems from my community record the acts of our possibility.