The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Born in Manatí, Puerto Rico in 1967 and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado (who has also written under the name María Arroyo Shaghaghi) is a multilingual poet, professor, and scholar. Her father worked the sugar cane farms in Puerto Rico before migrating to New York to become a tobacco farmworker. In Massachusetts, her mother worked in a garment factory. As a child, Arroyo Cruzado fell in love with writing in the fourth grade. Arroyo Cruzado is fluent in Spanish, German, Farsi, and English. In 1989, she graduated from Colby College with a BA in German. Later, she studied at Tufts University where she received an MA in Germanic language and literature in 1996. From 2007-2012, Arroyo Cruzado worked as a Poet-in-Residence with Teatro V!da in her hometown of Springfield, where she mentored aspiring writers. Inspired by her love for poetry, she went on to obtain an MFA in creative writing from Pine Manor College, where she studied with Reginald Dwayne Betts and X. In 2014, she became the poet laureatte of Springfield, Massachusetts. Her essays and poetry often explore identity, diaspora, domestic violence, womanhood, exile, language, and the body. In an interview with Sari Botton about aging, Arroyo exclaims, “I am joyfully a fat, brown, strong, big-breasted, sensual, highly passionate, multilingual Puerto Rican woman with naturally curly salt and pepper hair, Type II diabetes, intense Tigger energy, SAD (seasonal affective disorder), and an insatiable joy for teaching and learning. ¡Y soy un comelibros! And I am a woman who eats books!”Arroyo Cruzado is the author of Gathering Words: Recogiendo palabras (2008), Flight (2016), and Destierro Means More than Exile (2018),  Landscapes (2023), and Resistencia: Resilience (2023). Her poems have been published in The Revista Chicano-Riqueña, The Common, CALYX, and PALABRA, among other publications. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in comparative literature at Binghamton University.

Works Cited

Arroyo Cruzado, María Luisa. Interview conducted by Claire Jiménez. El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña, 2024.

Button, Sari. “This is 55: María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.” Oldster, 5 July 2023, https://oldster.substack.com/p/this-is-55-maria-luisa-arroyo-cruzado.

Gómez, Magdalena. “Springfield’s First Poet Laureate.” Af-Am Point of View, 31 Oct. 2014,  https://afampointofview.com/maria-luisa-arroyo/.

Luebbers, Mark. “Straw Dog Writers Guild Author Interview Series: María Luisa Arroyo.”  Straw Dog Writers Guild, 29 Sept. 2021, https://strawdogwriters.org/blog/straw-dog-writers-guild-author-interview-series-maria-luisa-arroyo. 

“Maria Luisa Arroyo.” Bay Path University, https://www.baypath.edu/academics/faculty-directory/biography/maria-luisa-arroyo-cruzado/.

“María Luisa Arroyo.” The Latino Author, http://thelatinoauthor.com/authors/a/maria-luisa-arroyo/.

 “María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado.” La Libreta, https://lalibreta.online/archives/january2022/Mar%C3%ADa_Luisa_Arroyo_Cruzado.html .

“María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado.” Poets Org, https://poets.org/poet/maria-luisa-arroyo.