Poet Profile

Daniel Shank Cruz

Daniel Shank Cruz (they/multitudes) is a genderqueer bisexual disabled boricua who grew up in the Bronx and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Multitudes is the author of a book of literary criticism, Queering Mennonite Literature (Penn State University Press, 2019), a hybrid memoir/literary critical text, Ethics for Apocalyptic Times (Penn State University Press, 2024), and a good possible year for an apocalypse: poems (Red Moon Press, 2025). With James Knippen, they are the co-author of It Breaks Your Heart: Haiku and Senryu on the 2023 New York Mets (Redheaded Press, 2024). Visit them there .

Awards and Other Honors:

2023 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nominee, Best of the Net 2024 Anthology nominee.

Books Published:

Queering Mennonite Literature (Penn State University Press, 2019); Ethics for Apocalyptic Times (Penn State University Press, 2024); a good possible year for an apocalypse: poems (Red Moon Press, 2025). Co-author of It Breaks Your Heart: Haiku and Senryu on the 2023 New York Mets (Redheaded Press, 2024).

summer solstice
the empty
Little League field

Halloween
fewer and fewer
pandemic haiku

Zoom meeting
I fall in love with her
bookcase

winter sky       smell of leather in the dungeon

winter solstice
his sun tattoo
half under the sheet

sunrise
on the escalator
a delivery bike

Credits:

“summer solstice” – Stardust Haiku Issue 44 (August 2020); “Halloween” – Modern Haiku vol. 53, no. 1 (Winter-Spring 2022); “Zoom meeting” – The Unexpected Weight: The Haiku Society of America Mentorship Program Anthology 2021, ed. Jay Friedenberg. N.p.: Haiku Society of America, 2022; “winter sky” – Heterodox Haiku 1, Autumn 2022, Best of the Net 2024 Anthology nominee; “winter solstice” – Kingfisher issue #7 (April 2023); “sunrise” – Kingfisher issue #8 (October 2023); 2023 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nominee.