Andrés Cerpa

Cerpa performed at our February 2026 Seriously Entertaining show, “It’s Not Me, It’s You.”

Andrés Cerpa is a poet whose spare, lyric fragments trace the architecture of grief, love, and transformation. Through this work, he distills overwhelming emotion into precise, haunting images. His new collection of poetry, The Palace, charts a family’s journey to build a life and home in a world that is often violent and rife with economic instability. Raised in Staten Island and shaped by childhood summers in Puerto Rico, Cerpa writes about what it means to reckon with loss, to confront the parts of yourself you’d rather bury, and to imagine new ways forward. Cerpa is also the author of two previous books of poetry: Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy and The Vault— which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, Cerpa’s writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poema-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and elsewhere.