William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For.

His first collection The Art of Exile was awarded the International Latino Book Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center andwas selected for The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Round Up” in Poets & Writers. The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, Archila’s second book, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. His new collection Canícula/Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology.

He was awarded the Jack Hazard fellowship and the PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellowship. His other honors include the Alan Collins Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writer’s Center, and the Fighting Fund Fellow Award from the University of Oregon.

His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Reivew, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and the anthologies Latino Poetry: The Library of American Anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.

and has received an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon.

In an online interview with the Poetry Society of America, Archila states, “To me the function of poetry is about naming the truth. It is about constructing a new language, and as long as there is a necessity to aesthetically form an authentic voice, there's no need to examine whether it's important or not. The human voice in struggle will always be important.”

He is an associate editor at Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land