Author Q&A with Karla Hernandez Torrijos

Karla Hernandez Torrijos is a formerly undocumented writer and teaching artist. Beginning at an open mic in 2017, she has since read her work in venues across Nebraska, New Mexico, and California. An award-winning poet, Karla’s work interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between. She is currently at work on her second manuscript.

Her poem, Farmworker Dies Fleeing an Immigration Raid in Southern California, was a finalist for the 2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize and appears in Issue #24.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Ironically enough, this was the hardest question for me to answer. In some ways, I like to think of myself as “the man behind the curtain” of a poem, the one pulling the levers of language to create an illusion. 

I am someone who grew up on the steps of the public library of a small Nebraska town, waiting for Laura to open the doors in the summers. I love tea with milk on the mornings when I don’t work, and whatever’s most caffeinated on the mornings when I do. I used to walk the mile home from middle school with a book held in front of me and the year I dropped out of high school, I only attended one class regularly— Language Arts. I love an em dash, I love an Oxford comma, and I still, still don’t know when to use a semicolon correctly. My favorite season is fall, though I often lie and say it’s spring, because I believe spring is the season of poets. I struggle to watch a movie without subtitles, a holdover from when my sister and I were learning English. I think the greatest genre of film is the romantic comedy, and that children make the best storytellers. And that fragments should be considered proper sentences. I talk a lot and I write even more and don’t always know when to stop. Finally, in the fourth grade, my teacher believed in my short story so much that she asked me to read it in front of the class. I never looked back.

What compelled you to write the poem?

I was undocumented from the ages of six to nineteen. The youngest, I was often protected from the harsher realities of immigration by my mother and sisters. While I did harbor some fear around my and my family’s safety, the 2000s and 2010s seemed like an entirely different world than the one we live in now— the rhetoric less vitriolic, the divisions between party lines less defined, and the general sentiment towards immigration, and immigrants themselves, less hateful. While this may simply be the world as seen through the eyes of a child, it seemed as if detentions and deportations were something that happened in other places, to other people. It is only now, within the safety afforded by my legal status, that I realize just how wrong I was, how close my family and I came to becoming another statistic, another headline.

I wrote this poem in July 2025, in the days following the news of Jaime Alanís’ death, caused by injuries he sustained during a fall, attempting to flee or hide from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents. Since this poem was written, I, alongside others, have watched as ICE has continued to rip apart families and communities. Most recently, footage from the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti went viral, with demonstrations and vigíls taking place across the country. While I am, of course, moved to see people mobilized to action (some for the first time), I have often asked myself to what extent legal status plays a role in people’s willingness to empathize. According to the National Immigration Project, thirty-three people died in ICE custody in 2025. As of September 1st of this year, at least twenty-six people have died in ICE custody or within days of their release from custody.

Geraldo Lunas Campos. Luis Gustavo Nuñez Caceres. Luis Beltrán Yañez-Cruz. Parady La. Victor Manuel Díaz. Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Lorth Sim. Jairo García-Hernández. Alberto Gutiérrez Reyes. Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi. Emmanuel Cleeford Damas. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal. Royer Pérez Jiménez. José Guadalupe Ramos-Solano. Tuan Van Bui. Alejandro Cabrera Clemente. Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt. Denny Adán González. Mamuka Artmeladze. Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez. Adrian Andreas Florian. Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva. Jose Chajon-Raxon. Priciliano Trejo. Edwin Lopez-Cornejo. Lianyong Wei. 

Perhaps, like me, your eyes moved quickly over the list of names. A list of names is just that, after all, a list. It is nearly impossible to find humanity in a wall of text. When I first read The New York Times article from which this poem takes its title, I was struck most by the indifferent tone of news reporting, the apparent detachment by which facts are presented. In writing this poem, I was forced to confront the limitations, and failure, of all language, including the poetic language I had long sought solace in. 

The poem’s form, a palindrome poem that breaks structure in its final line, was created by writer Nicole Sealey. In my opening line What is the right form / For laying down the dead man’s body? I contend with the central question of writing about Jaime Alanís at all, of trying to process my own pain without appropriating someone else’s grief. As a migrant writer, I have often felt complicit in the erasure of real people in favor of a gripping image or a moving story. A poem, despite whatever intention it begins with, can just as easily create caricatures of the very people it hopes to depict. This poem was my way of grappling with those feelings of complicitness, as well as an attempt to acknowledge the man at the heart of the headline. 

In many ways, all roads led me to that last line. Inspired by the work of Black activists, scholars, and the #SayHerName movement, I chose to end the poem with the simple fact of a name. Unlike a list, a single name forces us to sit in the uncomfortable and painful reality that many of us avoid: He was just like me or perhaps even more importantly, I was just like him. We can debate the sociopolitical and economic contexts surrounding a person’s death, the circumstances that lead to migration in the first place. We can disagree on immigration policy, about whether to build walls or extend pathways to citizenship. We cannot debate, or deny, one another’s humanity. 

Jaime, Mohammad, Tuan— they lived. They laughed, they sang, and in migrating, they dared to dream of a world bigger than the one they had inherited. And each, at one moment or another, was held in the arms of someone that loved them and wished for them a long and happy life. Just as you yourself were. The only difference is which side of the border you were born into. 

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it

I think perhaps the most surprising detail of the revision process is how little changed from the original draft to the final version! In reviewing my old journal, the first and final drafts of this poem look surprisingly similar— whereas the process of editing was more subtractive than additive, which is not usually the case for me. This was one of those rare cases where, once I knew the form I was writing in, the poem arrived nearly “itself”, so to speak. 

One small detail is that the original draft used Jaime Alanís’ full name. During the revision process, I decided to pare it down to just his first. This decision was born out of a desire for familiarity in the piece. A familiarity, that while unearned, allowed me to create a deeper sense of kinship and eventually, loss.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

I do! I write creative nonfiction, using elements from both fiction and poetry to tell stories from my own life. I hid behind poetry for a long time because I feared the confines of memoir and the scope of fiction. I signed up for an introductory course on creative nonfiction in college, not really knowing what it was, and fell in love. 

I recently sent an essay to a journal for the first time and received the kindest, most encouraging rejection letter in return. It was a good reminder that I’m headed in the right direction, and to keep going, despite not always being the most confident in my prose.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

In considering this question, I began with Joan Didion, who once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I must admit that I did not know the full quote until recently, in which she expands on the idea that writers impose “a narrative line upon disparate images” in their attempt to create order from the chaos of existence. Truth be told, I had always assumed she meant We tell ourselves stories in order to survive, that stories existed in much the same way the first stone blade must have— a tool in our ancestors’ hands that could change the course of an entire species. Through stories, we could recount our past, and in doing so, shape our future. 

I came to writing from a place of desperation, just as a lonely lifeboat arrives on the edges of shore. For a time, poetry became a refuge. In a moment of my life when I did not believe that the things I said mattered, writing became a way of exerting agency within the sentences of someone else’s narrative. I am not the first to say that writing, that all creativity, is an act of survival; that survival itself demands creativity. However, as I grew older, I began to see writing less as a life raft and more as a practice, perhaps the building of a home—intentional, methodical, labor intensive. 

One of the central pillars of this house I’ve built is my belief that writing must serve a greater purpose than aesthetic beauty, a sentiment best encapsulated by the James Baldwin quote, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” 

All my writing is an attempt towards what Baldwin is describing. I am pointing out at the world, I am saying ‘Look at that barn swallow, look at that meadow, look at that child in the detention center’ and it is because I love you, and because I love you, I want you to see what I see. Not all

of it is pastoral and not all of it is painful but all of it is important. Palestinian writer Marwan Makhoul said in his now-famous poem, In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent. 

You cannot write about the beauty of the meadow if it is engulfed in flames nor the barn swallow’s song if she is choking on smoke. I am not interested in writing as merely an act of witnessing, nor as a weapon by which the traumatized are re-traumatized in perpetuity. My desire to write is fueled by the foundational belief that we cannot face it if we cannot name it, or to say it in the words of Lucillle Clifton, “We cannot create what we can’t imagine.” 

Perhaps yesterday, writing was a lifeboat, today it is the house we are building, and tomorrow it is the front door that we must walk through to see what exists beyond these four walls. The work of writing is also the work of transfiguration. I am writing not simply to reflect, but also to reimagine. What worlds exist within our reach, at the edge of our pens? 

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

Lately, I have been writing ten minute poems during my breaks at work. There is a kind of spark that ignites when you’re forced into such an inflexible constraint. I have found that this practice has made me a better writer, as the limitations of time demand that I move through the page swiftly and with confidence. I don’t have time to look up a word or to hand-wring over whether a particular image is working. Gone are the days of Walden Pond, a myth created in part due to the unpaid and unacknowledged labor of women. Nearly every writer I know has a day job that pulls them away from the page. 

The reality, somewhat laughable, is that I do not find a balance between writing and other responsibilities. Sometimes, the dishes lay heaped in the kitchen sink while I work on an essay. Other times, the poem lays unfinished as I get ready for that morning’s shift, muttering lines to myself. I remember reading once that famed poet and physician William Carlos Williams favored such short stanzas in part because he wrote poems in between patients at the hospital. Whether this is true or not is besides the point. The point, I suppose, is that all art is a give and take. On a more practical level, I carry a small notebook in my tote bag. I try to write as often as I can, which is still not nearly as often as I would like, and I let the dishes pile up more than I

care to admit. I ask myself what is non-negotiable and go from there. There are some responsibilities that cannot be shirked— morning shifts, doctor’s appointments. Still, in between these, there are brief windows of time. Now and again, I try to look through them.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

Raised in Nebraska most of my life, I can’t help but think of our state sign when I hear those words. Nebraska… the good life in bold white letters against that specific shade of road-sign green. Home of Arbor Day. I am of the belief that a good life, the good life, is slow, intentional living. Like our sign, the good life is understated. It is not the highlights, although those are there too, but rather the daily work of building and keeping community. 

Another word for this might be family. It is your grandfather’s hands, time-worn as the recipe pages he turns, looking for a beef gravy that smells like a childhood home does. It is your best friend’s laughter, the kind that only emerges from relief, a sunray peeking through clouds, after an especially long year. It is the work of writing, often solitary, always deliberate, as you reach into an opaque river to try and find something glimmering. 

The good life is the small and miraculous occurrences that appear every day but are swept up by routine and responsibility. The perfectly brewed cup of coffee, the commute with only green lights, or the line in the poem that holds your gaze, the way only a reflection can.

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Thank you, Karla, for being generous with your time and your pen and for sharing so openly. The poetry of any age or time period is documentation of the state of the world and your answers and explanations are heartbreaking and also compelling.

We appreciate you being a part of our growing community, our TGLR family and we wish you the best with life and all your writing endeavors!