Joseph O. Legaspi is a Filipino American poet whose writing explores migration, family, desire, memory, belonging, queer life, and the emotional geography of home. Born in the Philippines, he moved to Los Angeles with his family at age twelve. He later earned a BA from Loyola Marymount University and an MFA from New York University.
Legaspi is the author of the poetry collections Imago, Threshold, and Amphibian, along with chapbooks including Subways, Aviary, Bestiary, and Postcards. His work belongs to a rich field of contemporary poets writing across immigrant experience, Asian American literature, queer identity, and lyric form.
Imago
CavanKerry Press published Imago in 2007. The collection received a Global Filipino Literary Award and established several themes that continue across Legaspi’s work: family histories, the Philippines and the United States, intimacy, the body, memory, and the transformations produced by migration.
His poems often place private experience within a larger cultural landscape. Family relationships can carry histories of movement between countries, while domestic scenes open toward questions of language, inheritance, sexuality, and belonging.
Threshold
Threshold, published by CavanKerry Press in 2017, extends Legaspi’s attention to love, partnership, home, mortality, and the everyday spaces through which a life takes shape. The title suggests a recurring condition in his poetry: the speaker often stands at a point of passage between places, identities, memories, or emotional states.
That movement gives his lyric poems a strong sense of physical and psychological location. Rooms, neighborhoods, transit, family spaces, and remembered landscapes become structures through which intimate experience acquires historical depth.
Amphibian
Amphibian, published by Curbstone Books in 2026, is Legaspi’s third full-length poetry collection. Its title continues his longstanding interest in lives shaped by movement across environments and identities. The image of an amphibious existence resonates with migration, adaptation, inheritance, and the experience of belonging to more than one cultural world.
Kundiman and Asian American literature
In 2004, Legaspi cofounded Kundiman with poet Sarah Gambito. The organization has become a major national home for Asian American writers and readers, supporting literary community through workshops, retreats, readings, mentorship, and publication.
This work places Legaspi’s career inside the communal history of contemporary American poetry as well as his own bibliography. His writing and institutional work both participate in the continuing development of Asian American literary culture. Readers can place that history beside Shampoo’s guides to American poetry and immigrant poetry.
Teaching, honors, and literary life
Legaspi is a Fulbright scholar and a two-time poetry fellow of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has taught at New York University and Fordham University and has worked at Columbia University. In January 2022, he served as guest editor for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.
The Academy of American Poets provides a current biography, bibliography, and selection of his poems. The Poetry Foundation offers additional biographical context and recordings.