Efren Laya Cruzada is a poet who was born in the Philippines and raised in Alice, Texas. He studied English and American Literature and Creative Writing at New York University. He is the author of Grand Flood: a poem. His poems have been published in several journals, most recently in The Tiger Moth Review, Discretionary Love, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Efren’s primary focus is aesthetics and the ways in which aesthetic sensations can be manifested through text. Recent writings have included poetry about the nature and cities from his travels as well as fiction writing from a Filipino-American perspective. He enjoys reading poetry and text from different cultures throughout history, and he has been particularly drawn to French Symbolists, ancient Chinese poetry, The Romantics, Anglo-Saxon literature, and Philippine literature. He attempts to contextualize all of these influences through a contemporary, modernist, and postmodernist lens.

Enjoying writing and text in its many forms, he has written science fiction and fantasy poetry and stories and has experimented with all types of structures and forms, from writing one-word poems to delirious, surrealistic prose poetry.