Meet 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow Andres Cordoba

Leading up to the 2025 Ruth Lilly-Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows' reading in Miami on Friday, April 10 as part of O, Miami's Poetry Festival, we will feature profiles of each of the five fellows. We are excited to continue introducing you to and celebrating these outstanding young poets. 

Andres Cordoba is moving back to New York City after receiving his MFA at Brown University. New York is a foundational place for him: his grandmother and grandfather, Polish-Jewish and Peruvian immigrants, respectively, moved to the city in the 1970s, and as a kid growing up in Massachusetts, he describes his family’s visits to New York “like entering a world of color TV.” About being awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, he says it was one of those things he had never dreamed of doing, but that he’s grateful for the financial assistance to help his sister with school, and hopes his poetry opens doors for others as well. He is currently working on a set of poems he calls the “Monica poems,” which are a series of long, epistolary letter-poems to a figure named Monica. 

Cordoba first started writing poetry as a kid during a field trip to the Fells in Massachusetts. He describes himself as a loud kid who wanted reactions from people, so he wrote a poem about the nature around them to amuse his teacher and peers with “how beautiful my silence is.” From there, Cordoba primarily wrote fiction until his time as an undergraduate at SUNY Purchase, where he began taking poetry classes. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, he started reading voraciously and found that “when you interact with art, it just opens your world.” He describes himself as un-academic and says that he never read poetry when he was younger. “But once I started reading it, I realized my whole life, the thoughts that I had in my head, these were just poems that wanted to get out into the world. I think poetry can make a lot of people love themselves more,” he says. 

As a writer, Cordoba finds inspiration from many poets: Big Brown (William Clifford Brown), Natalie Diaz, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Loisa Fenichell, Bob Kaufman, Layli Long Soldier, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Simic, to name a few. He also believes in the importance of going outside to write and being out in the world. To Cordoba, writing is not something that must be sequestered in a dedicated space; rather, he quotes Thoreau, “Write while the heat is in you.” He encourages young writers to write—and read—as much as they can, whenever and wherever they can, in any pockets of time available to them. He also advises young writers to be willing to do anything, write anything, and to prioritize their people and communities over awards and institutions. “How are your art and your passion moving outside of you? What are you seeing it doing to the people around you, and what positive can come of that?” he says. 

Cordoba thinks of poetry as “a challenge of deprogramming, the taking back of a word and expunging it of market definition.” He believes poetry is beautiful because it returns language to the people. “Poetry’s job is to show you how bullshit your language is, and how you’ve been so precious your whole life about a few words,” he says. He talks about the strength of oppressed poets, like those in Palestine, to continue writing and finding softness in the face of genocide, and stresses the importance of investing in the poetry scene globally and supporting oppressed peoples. 

Cordoba would like to give a shoutout to his younger sister, Kat, who is attending SUNY Purchase this fall, and of whom he is endlessly proud and supportive. He believes that poetry is not necessarily just language work, but an act of living. “There are a lot of ways to write a poem, and a lot of them don’t require words. A lot of them just mean waking up in the morning and driving to fucking work and doing a job where no one likes you. And still wanting to see the world in its full colors,” he says.