About
Isabel Cruz is a Puerto Rican poet, artist, performance artist, playwright, and the Emeritus Youth Poetry Ambassador for the Paterson Poetry Festival, where, as Vice President, she chairs the Festival Planning Committee. In 2024, she received her B.A. in American Studies and English Creative Writing with a Poetry Concentration from Smith College. Among other awards, she won the 2024 Five College Prose & Poetry Prize, the 2024 Elizabeth Babcock Prize for Best Poem, and the 2023 Eleanor Cederstrom Prize. Publications include The Poetry Society of New York, When Women Speak, Ghost City Review, and WAYE Small Press, among others. She exhibited broadsides of her selected poems at AM:PM Gallery’s “The Space She Holds” exhibit in March 2025. In October 2024, she was a Featured Poet at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Cruz has been named a 2025 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and was awarded a full scholarship from The Poetry Project for their Late Summer 2025 Learning program. Since 2024, Cruz has been a reader for The Massachusetts Review.
Isabel Cruz has performed in venues such as the legendary Bowery Poetry Club, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Dodge Poetry Festival at the NJPAC, the Newark Arts Festival, the Williams Center, the New York Poetry Festival, and the Paterson Poetry Festival. She has taught workshops for such institutions as Georgetown University, the University of Washington-Bothell MFA, and New Jersey City University.