Cuban American poet Kyle Carrero Lopez first learned what sanctions were as a child, not as a political measure, but as a gendered one. In his poem “Sanctions,” he writes of a father, a Cuban refugee and DJ, laying down the terms of acceptable masculinity: “No dance class/no ‘girl toys’/don’t walk like that.”

The poem appears in his debut collection, Party Line, published in July by Graywolf Press. As Suzy Exposito reports for De Los, Carrero, a gay, Black Cuban American writer based in New York, uses social etiquette to examine how marginalized people learn to negotiate space, whether at a nightclub, on Fire Island, or in line at the border.

Born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, he earned an MFA at NYU and previously published the chapbook Muscle Memory. “There are two sides of me,” he told De Los. “Between the party girl and the politico is Kyle Carrero Lopez.”

For Gen Ñ readers, the book holds the dance floor and the political argument in the same conversation.

Original reporting: Suzy Exposito, De Los / Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2026.

Further reading: Graywolf Press, Party Line.

Photo credit: Elana Marie / For De Los.