JP Legarte

JP Legarte is a first-year Filipinx American graduate student at Emerson College pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) and serves as a poetry reader and digital editor for Redivider. At Brink and F(r)iction, he researches and develops grant opportunities and partnerships with local and national organizations and collaborates with authors to help bring their pieces toward publication. 

He won first place for the 2024 Leonard A. Slade Jr. Poetry Fellowship with the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, was a 2023 Jack McCarthy Book Prize finalist with Write Bloody Publishing, and is an alum of the Anaphora Arts Writing Residency, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Macondo Writers Workshop. His in-progress poetry manuscript focuses on unpacking the pasts, the present, and the potential futures of colonialism and colonialism’s legacies and effects on Filipinx Americans, centering on animals as avenues into memory, metaphor, musings, and the idea of colonialism as extinction. You can follow what’s going on in his life and his poetic musings on Instagram at @jpl091.