Rey M. Rodríguez

Rey M. Rodríguez is a poet, writer, advocate and attorney who lives in Pasadena, California. His debut poetry collection, Todos Somos Sagrados / All Are Sacred (El Martillo Press, 2026), is a bilingual tribute — written in English and Spanish — to the immigrant women of Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights. The collection carries a preface by Father Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries.

For more than thirty years, Rodríguez’s relationship with Proyecto Pastoral has shaped his understanding of faith, community and justice. He has witnessed women respond to poverty, violence and displacement not with despair, but with courage, compassion and action — creating shelter, protecting children and building spaces of belonging. Their example inspired Todos Somos Sagrados, a collection rooted in the conviction that every human being is sacred, with an inherent dignity that begins in the way we see and care for one another.

Rodríguez’s poetry draws from memory, testimony and the spiritual life of community. His work centers on voices too often overlooked and explores immigration, identity, faith, family and the quiet heroism of people who serve without fanfare. Through his writing, he seeks to preserve stories that might otherwise be lost and to honor those who transform hardship into hope.

Rodríguez received his MFA in fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a graduate of Cornell University, Princeton University and the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. He has attended the Yale Writers’ Workshop and the Palabras de Pueblo workshop, and participated in StoryStudio Chicago’s Novel in a Year program.

His poetry appears in Huizache, the anthology Anger Is a Gift and the Altadena Poetry Review. His interviews and book reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, La Bloga, Chapter House, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine and the Los Angeles Review. He is currently at work on a novel set in Mexico City and the Mayan underworld.