Deep gratitude to the following organizations: the Macondo Writers Workshop with special thanks to Sandra Cisneros; CantoMundo, whose workshops yielded a number of the poems in this book; the Dodge Poetry Festival, for their invitation to read at their festival in 2018; Split This Rock, for their invitation to read at their festival in 2010; Red Hen Press and Kate Gale, for inviting me to read at a number of their events over the years; Mesa Refuge with special thanks to Susan Page Tillet, for designating me as the inaugural Poetry Fellow in 2015; the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley with special thanks to Brenda Hillman for inviting me to be a staff poet in 2017; the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, for being my institutional home since 2003. I’d like to acknowledge and thank my fellow co-founding members of the Poetry Coalition for their camaraderie in recent years. My gratitude to Hank Feenstra for a one-week writers retreat in the Pacific Northwest in 2014. My thanks to Fred Arroyo and Emma Trelles for offering a fresh set of eyes on the manuscript and providing feedback for the “pruning” that After Rubén underwent. Special thanks to Michael Dowdy, Juan Felipe Herrera, Carmen Giménez Smith, Cornelius Eady, Ada Limón, John Phillip Santos, and Valerie Martínez for their endorsements. Special thanks to Jose Rodeiro for permission to reproduce his art on the cover. Fellow writers who have been compañero/as and inspirational models of literary citizenship over the years: Fred Arroyo, Naomi Ayala, José Ballesteros, Richard Blanco, Sarah Browning, Carmen Calatayud, Don Cellini, Teri Cross Davis, Blas Falconer, Gina Franco, Carmen Giménez Smith, Rigoberto González, Maria Melendez Kelson, Alexandra Lytton-Regalado, John Matthias, Orlando Menes, Juan J. Morales, Carlos Parada Ayala, Kim Roberts, John Phillip Santos, Emma Trelles, Natalia Treviño, Dan Vera, and Louis Villalba. Other friends who have nourished me: Bill McGrath, Wally Babington, Ken Crocker, Marvin Kuperstein, Roger Carlson, Stan Peabody, Wesley Waite, Gary Hogle, Paul Romero, José Medina, Larry Feinberg, Steve Leahy, Dave Glidden, and George Castillo. Hearfelt thanks to Kate Gale and Mark Cull, with whom I connected in 2009 at the FIL in Guadalajara, Mexico and embarked on multifaceted collaborations, including this book—it’s been fun. Special thanks to my family on the West Coast for their unconditional love and support. The essay, “My Rubén” was written on the coast of Devon in Torquay, England: thank you, Mike Cook, for providing a home during the homestretch of this book.