This year’s judge for the 2026 Peseroff Prize is Poet Dan Ruiz. Daniel Ruiz is a poet and translator born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico and raised in Orlando, Florida. His first collection of poetry, Reality Checkmate, was published by Four Way Books in Spring 2025. He earned his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and his B.A. in Creative Writing and Spanish from Florida State University. In 2016, he was a Fulbright Fellow to Valparaiso, Chile, where he worked with students on literary translation at Playa Ancha University. His poems can be found in POETRY, Bennington Review, New Letters, Missouri Review, Interim, River Styx, and elsewhere. Dan is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. 

       Dan talked about his path to writing and offered some advice to aspiring writers in a conversation with Erik Bittner, one of Breakwater’s poetry editors. 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

Dan, could you start with some biographical background?  

 

Well, I was born in Puerto Rico, but I moved to Florida when I was 5 years old. So English is not my native language.  My parents were teachers and naturally they valued education and instilled that value in me. I think growing up bilingual gave me an early appreciation for languages. Dad is a real inspiration—he speaks 5 languages, (laughs) I can only speak two! 

 

When did you know you wanted to be a writer? 

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It wasn’t something I was conscious of becoming, in the sense of, “oh, now it’s time to go to college, you need to decide what you are going to do.” As a kid, I just wrote. It was just another activity, like basketball. So I never knew I wanted to be a writer, I just was one. My parents were great about that—they never pressured me to do any particular thing.

 

Did you study creative writing in college? 

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I first applied to be premed. But a friend of mine told me I was too lazy to be premed. So, I wrote the world’s worst novel to prove him wrong. It’s completely unpublishable. But I showed myself that if I could write a novel, I could do creative writing, and that’s what I did. At first, I thought I would write fiction, but after taking a poetry workshop, it was pretty clear that was where my energies should go. 

 

What is special about poetry? 

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I like that with poetry you can really focus on the small things, and that’s a little harder with longer pieces of fiction. I was a drummer, and it trained me to hear all the little sounds going on at the same time. Poetry is like that for me, picking out a single small sound. I also like the challenge of distilling things down to their simplest expression.  

  

Sometimes you sit down and want to write—but you’re stuck.  How do you unstick yourself?  

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Well, I’m always working—I let writing interrupt my daily life by having post it notes next to me; if a friend says something that can go into a poem, I write it down right then. I see this happen with my students—they get trapped into thinking big and stay stuck looking for meaning. Virginia Woolf said theory always follows the art, and in the workshop, that means write first and then find the meaning. It’s better not to be fixated on meaning with a capital M . . . be open to your own mind, collect images instead of trying to think of what you want to say. Thinking small helps too! I’ll also change up the media; if I’m writing on paper, maybe I’ll switch to a Word Doc. Or switch from pencil to pen, or notebook to loose paper. Different media create different writing environments, sometimes that can help. 

 

Do you have goals in writing, for example, writing for a certain amount of time, or number of pages? 

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I might do the same thing every day but I don’t think of it as a routine. I’m not afraid to make things different to get the work done. I also try to read every day. Oscar Wilde said the first line falls from the ceiling. 

 

How did your voice come about?  What advice would you give to aspiring writers?  

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Sometimes it’s finding your voice, but sometimes it’s losing your voice. Miles Davis said it takes a long time to sound like yourself. I was lucky growing up—I was allowed to be a talkative goofball: to be myself. I didn’t have people telling me not to be curious, or do this, or don’t do that. My advice is to think smaller. I prioritize sound, then sense, because I want it to sound good. Then I’ll ask myself, is it saying what I want it to say. 

 

You talked about your interest in el ser y el paracer, or reality and appearance in a previous interview. What have the past few years provided you in terms of content, or new takes on the idea?  

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How do I put this; when I see an engine I see what I think is the engine, but there’s the reality—a mechanic sees something different; valves, the battery and so on. Their knowledge changes the appearance to them. I use my knowledge, or lack of it, to generate language about it, to defamiliarize myself with the object instead of what’s in my head when I see an engine. 

       People have been writing about trees forever, but how can I as a writer in 2026 put a tree in a poem without people saying this has been done? Once I was in downtown Austin walking at night and I see a man, he looked like he worked for the city, stopping at each tree to clap two blocks of wood together at each one. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he’s scaring birds away so they wouldn’t congregate in the trees. At first, the appearance I had was of a weird man. I didn't know what was going on. The reality was the restaurants were paying the city to shoo the birds away so their caws wouldn’t compete with the live music playing in the bars. Look and record things without context and then look again with context.   

       Understanding is a second order thing, and I think you want to start with the first, which is the encounter with the art. The second order is the thoughts right after. The third order is how it’s remembered, or how it stays in the mind. I’m not interested in destroying language like a surrealist poet or using difficult syntax to abandon the encounter and go directly to my thoughts. Pay attention to the after experience-- but first, find something by looking and thinking smaller. 

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