A Conversation with Juan J. Morales

Experience the Episode

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

Immerse yourself in a deeply moving oral history interview with poet Juan J. Morales, hosted by Notre Dame graduate Misael Osorio-Conde ’21 MFA. Together, they explore heritage, memory, and artistic craft as lived experiences across borders transformed into poignant verse. Let them guide you through personal grief, ecological responsibility, and unexpected humor while providing the essential inspiration needed to articulate your own authentic cultural narrative with profound literary resonance.

Morales and fellow Puerto Rican poet Blas Falconer in-residence at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art in late October 2026, spending time in the permanent collection observing, reflecting, and writing new ekphrastic poetry inspired by an artwork on display as a part of “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” a multi-year partnership between the Museum and Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of the University’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS).

For more information on Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

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Meet the Poet: Juan J. Morales

Juan J. Morales is the author of four poetry collections, including Dream of the Bird Tattoo, The Siren World, winner of the 2026 Reading the West Book Awards and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Morales has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, and Longleaf Writers Conference. Recent poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Slowdown Podcast, High Plains Pueblo Radio, and Inscape. He lives in Pueblo, Colorado, occasionally teaches for Lighthouse Writers in Denver, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado College.

Meet the Moderator: Misael Osorio-Conde '21 MFA

Misael Osorio-Conde ’21 MFA is a Mexican poet transplanted from Southern California to the Midwest where he earned his MFA at the University of Notre Dame. In his work he attempts to capture the passage of language through the threshold of the body. He is also interested in the traumas of crossing borders and how those traumas follow the language; interested in the marks those traumas leave inscribed by their passage, and how memory helps us to reconstruct a more humane vision for the future. In 2019 he participated in the national “One Poem Festival for Migrant Justice” and conducted an interview with the poet Juan Morales for Letras Latinas’ Oral History Project. Some of his poems have appeared in the online literary journals deLuge, Storyscape, and the leftist journal Protean Magazine.

some were just the Fragments // es que fueron solo los Fragmentos

The poems in Misael Osorio-Conde’s debut collection some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo los Fragmentos engage with memory to reenact the cultural, psychological, and linguistic border-crossing that Osorio-Conde experienced as part of his formative years where he learned to live in the shadows of exile as well as a new language. Threading the needle between disclosure and acceptance, lyricism and narrative, and encapsulating new and inventive formal structures, the poems in some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo los Fragmentos attempt to make sense of Osorio-Conde’s crossing while grieving an indefinitely deferred return to his native land. The poems presented in this bilingual collection are built for our contemporary moment, while laced with the timeless realities, hardships, and most importantly, the successes, loves, family, and camaraderie that define human experience.

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