lan Chazaro is a Bay Area-raised poet, journalist, and educator now living in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, whose work bridges hip-hop, Chicano identity, and speculative imagination. He is the author of multiple poetry collections, Piñata Theory, This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, and, most recently, These Spaceships Weren’t Built for Us.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Chazaro reflects on a nonlinear path to poetry that begins outside the classroom and finds its way, through community college and University of California, Berkeley’s Poetry for the People program, into a fully realized artistic practice. He speaks candidly about invisibility, code-switching, and the layered identities of Chicano life, while also offering a powerful meditation on craft, intuition, and the radical openness of poetry as a form.
At the center of the discussion is his collection These Spaceships Weren’t Built for Us, a work that situates itself within and expands the terrain of Latino futurism. For Chazaro, the metaphor of the spaceship becomes both critique and invitation: a recognition that existing institutions were never designed with certain communities in mind, and a call to imagine and build new vessels for survival, creativity, and joy.
What emerges is a portrait of a writer deeply attuned to community, who understands poetry not as an isolated art, but as a collaborative, generative force. This interview offers not only insight into Chazaro’s work but also a compelling vision of what it means to write and live toward a more expansive world.