Nathan Xavier Osorio

Nathan Xavier Osorio is an American poet and educator from Los Angeles, California. He is the author of Querida, which won the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His chapbook The Last Town Before the Mojave was selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. In 2025, Osorio was selected as the 46th resident poet of the Dartmouth poet-in-residence at Frost Place.

Early life and education Osorio was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He earned a PhD in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz, with a concentration in Latin American and Latino Studies and Visual Studies, and has an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University School of the Arts. In 2023, he served as a Humanities Institute Public Fellow at the University of California Press, and in 2024 he was selected as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Irvine, where he worked with Héctor Tobar on a poetry project, Tierra Madre.

He has characterized his debut collection, Querida, as a reflection of his family and home life. He has also explained using literary devices like ekphrasis and non-Western cosmologies as part of his poetics. In an interview with poet Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Osorio described his work as an attempt to create new rituals and forms that make room for vulnerability while challenging inherited structures of power.

Books Title Year Type Publisher