COLORADO POET LAUREATE

Colorado Humanities is thrilled to share the news that Crisosto Apache is the new Colorado Poet Laureate, appointed by Governor Polis on January 28, 2026. Crisosto Apache is from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo). Apache’s clanships are the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. Apache attended and earned an MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. Crisosto is also an editor-at-large for The Offing Magazine ^[1]. Apache’s books are GENESIS (Lost Alphabet, Out-of-Print) and Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award ^[2] and a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Authors League Award in poetry, with a new poetry collection is(ness), from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. Apache is a part-time multimedia artist and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Crisosto also continues to be an advocate for the Two-spirit/Indigiqueer community for the past twenty years, working in grassroots non-profit organizations both locally and nationally.

Crisosto describes the role they are about to boldy take on this way: “To serve as Poet Laureate of Colorado is to write from a landscape that teaches us how to listen. Listen to mountains that hold silence like an old wisdom, to rivers that speak in silver tongues of time, to plains that remind us of breath, distance, and belonging. My vision begins there: in honoring the geography that shapes us, and the communities who give it meaning. I would seek to amplify the voices of those whose stories are rooted in the soil and sky of this state—Indigenous, immigrant, rural, urban, young, and old—so that poetry becomes not an ornament but a shared language of presence and possibility. I would see the role as both a calling and a bridge: to bring poetry into spaces where it rarely travels. These spaces include classrooms, community centers, libraries, farms, and shelters, and to remind Coloradans that poetry is not confined to the page. It lives in the cadence of conversation, in protest and prayer, in the rhythm of footsteps on snow. The Poet should strive to make poetry a public act of witness, gratitude, and renewal; an art form that helps us see ourselves and one another more clearly, and that keeps alive our most essential human instinct: to find meaning, even in the thin air of change.”

The Colorado Poets Laureate help us process the present and also inspire us to dream of the future we want to create. Colorado Humanities is grateful to support Crisosto in their vision of how best to do this work with communities across our state.