Born in Manatí, Puerto Rico & raised in Springfield, MA, María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado claims four languages & cultures of experiences: Puerto Rican Spanish, American English, German & Farsi. They dynamically feed her imagination, her poems &  her essays. 

María Luisa's collections include:

Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Review Press, 2008)

 Destierro Means More than Exile (2018)

Landscapes, a chapbook of poems & photos (2023)

Resistencia: Resilience, poems & essays (Human Error Publishing, 2023)

Thought Here Would Cure Me of There, a poetry memoir (forthcoming with Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024)

A feminist intersectional educator & engaging poetry workshop facilitator in online & in-person settings, María Luisa motivates students and poets alike to take positive risks with generating drafts of ghazals, ekphrastic poems, code-switching poems & multicultural/multilingual poems.

The successes of her poetry workshops & curated multi-genre readings with community members in the Greater Springfield MA area, some in partnership with the Springfield City Library, at the Mass Poetry Festival, at the Monson Arts Festival, among others contributed to María Luisa being named as the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA (2014-2016). Additional joyful accolades include being named a 2016 New England Public Radio Arts & Humanities Award recipient, 2019 Rising Star Teaching Fellow at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference, 2021 Assets for Artists grant recipient and 2022 ValleyCreates Project Evolution Grant recipient. 

Currently, María Luisa is pursuing her PhD in Comparative Literature as a Clark Diversity Fellow at Binghamton University. She also teaches creative non-fiction in the M.F.A. Program at Bay Path University and teaches German and Spanish online to adult students. In 2024, she will also edit and publish the inaugural anthology under her literary imprint MultiCreative Wisdom.