Poetry at The Dalí is an ongoing series hosted by former poet laureate of St. Petersburg, Helen Pruitt Wallace, on the second Thursday of each month featuring select poets. This month's poets are Letisia Cruz and Dustin Brookshire.

Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is the author of The Lost Girls Book of Divination (Tolsun Books, 2018). Her poetry manuscript Migrations & Other Exiles was awarded the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming in 2023 from Lost Horse Press. She is the recipient of a 2022 artist grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance for her project Rituales: An Exploration of Faith in the Caribbean. Her writing and artwork have appeared in [PANK], Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, Saw Palm, Third Coast, Duende, Moko Caribbean Arts & Letters, 300 Days of Sun, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Ink Brick and Sakura Review, among others. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and a member of the Artist Enclave of Historic Kenwood (AEHK). She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with her partner and their cats, plants and several hundred lizards.


Dustin Brookshire’s chapbooks include Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023), and the editor of the forthcoming chapbook anthology, When I Was Straight: A Maureen Seaton Tribute (Harbor Anthologies). He’s the recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship at Poetry by the Sea. In 2021, and was a finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Award. Dustin has been nominated for the Best of the Net and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his work has earned him residencies through The Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room and South Porch Artists Residency. Find him online at dustinbrookshire.com.