Edgar Garcia

I am a poet and scholar of the hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, focusing especially on the relation between crisis and creativity, emergency and emergence, and historical loss and world historical creation. My own life story traces these themes through family migrations from Central America, as civil wars pushed us north from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. My work therefore begins in a felt absence and distance. Rather than just stay in that absence and distance, I focus on the tremendous creative and critical leaps my intellectual forebearers in the Americas have made in confronting catastrophe.

By looking with—and not simply at—the work of these forebearers, I am drawn to their spirit of endurance and creativity. Because the archives I work with are typically attenuated by colonial erasure, my practice involves life's full spectrum: poetry and poetics, literary history, linguistics and languages, art history, anthropology, archeology, mythology, intellectual history, music, and performance. I believe such a multi-modal and multi-disciplinary approach is necessary to even begin articulating the plenitude, power, and possibility of what has only seemingly been lost to history.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar whose work engages the cultures of the Americas across colonial, contemporary, Mestizo, and Indigenous histories. His writing emphasizes the contemporaneity of these histories and cultural practices by examining how creativity emerges from conditions of crisis and world-historical emergency. Cultural production is a site where inherited forms are activated under pressure, generating new modes of thought, relation, and survival.

Garcia’s method is explicitly multidisciplinary and multimodal, privileging forms of literature and culture of people and times that have not always been recognized as such. His practice attends to non-alphabetical sign systems, including pictographs and hieroglyphs; dreams and dreaming practices; divinatory almanacs and conceptions of fortune, fate, and influence; ritualistic song traditions and colonial songbooks; and Mesoamerican creation stories. Rather than treating these materials as objects to be interpreted from a distance, Garcia works from their internal logics, seeking to look with them and to cultivate forms of intellectual kinship that recalibrate how familiarity and difference are perceived.

His publications include Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which develops a hemispheric theory of non-alphabetical writing; Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), a hybrid poetic and ethnographic work; and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which reads the K’iche’ Maya creation narrative as a sustained meditation on emergency and emergence. Garcia’s collection Cantares (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) reimagines the sixteenth-century Cantares Mexicanos, treating Nahuatl-language songs as living musical and poetic structures rather than archival artifacts. Garcia has also completed Caravaggio’s Americas: Travels in the Colonial Baroque, a sequence of travel essays, arguing that the concept of the “baroque Americas” is foundational rather than derivative.

Garcia’s expanded practice includes collaborative performance and sound-based work centered on the indigenously baroque soundscape of the Americas. In July 2025, his operatic and performative project developed with composer Keir GoGwilt and the ensemble Zarabanda Variations, premiered at Lincoln Center in New York, NY. It has subsequently travelled to venues including the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and Fordham University, Bronx, NY. Garcia’s collaboration with painter Eamon Ore-Giron on the artist book Infinite Regress, was published in Berlin by Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite in 2021, extending his inquiry into visual, spatial, and sonic forms. 

Garcia holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (2015) and a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley (2005). He has served as a project advisor for the permanent collections at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and as a visiting editor-in-chief for Fence Magazine. Garcia is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.