Who (or what!?) is Oliveira Poetry?

A little bit about

My first poetry event: UChicago Art Fair 2018! I wrote $1 poems on a typewriter.

Oliveira Poetry is a weekly newsletter of poetry curated by (and sometimes created by) me, Ricky, the chill dude in the photo.

Here’s why you should subscribe.

I created Oliveira Poetry to share poetry with my community, showcase my own writing to the world, and promote writers that uphold ideas I’m inspired by. Ideally, Oliveira Poetry is also to become a community of poetics beyond my own writing.

In 2021, I started a weekly email chain with a small circle of coworkers. Teaching in an urban public high school is not easy, so each week I sent my lovely coworkers a poem I love to ease our stressed minds. It was fun! The mini-dialogue in our email forum was engaging, a quick reprieve from the labor.

Thursdays became the day I gave myself time to dig through undergrad material, mindfully scroll Twitter, or write in order to find the perfect poem. That hobby added to my love for curating (and occasionally writing) good poetry.

The Poem of the Week comes from this hobby: each poem featured in the PotW series is either a poem that speaks to me or a poem that is written from me.

I have been a lover and writer of poetry since my sappy teenage years. I formally studied poetry in my even sappier college years, taught Creative Writing and various forms of writing for the past few years, and am an assistant editor for a very cool online journal of poetry. Right now, I am working on a forthcoming collection of poetry as well as towards MFA applications. So, ya know, the poetry I send out will be decent, one would hope.

You may be thinking “why should I let some (half-)white guy tell me what to read???” That’s a good question. The poetry community, from my perspective, is saturated by White, white, male, and otherwise privileged voices. My goal through Oliveira Poetry is to dismantle my share of white patriarchal poetics by uplifting words from voices speaking out of margins in addition to writing out of and from my community(-ies).

Oliveira Poetry (with Poem of the Week) is an attempt to extend my own roots while sharing my favorites from the current ecosystem of modern poetry.

Subscribe today and let’s grow together.

PS — The ‘de Oliveira’ in my name and the site’s namesake roughly translates from Portuguese to English as “of the olive tree.” I hope the poems in PotW are olives without pits, so you don’t have to spit anything out.