Tommy Pico

Born in December 13, 1983, Tommy Pico is a Native American (Kumeyaay Nation) writer, poet, and podcast host. Nobody actually wants to read a "nature poem" written by an Indigenous guy, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves. Or rather, they do, but only if it matches some weird, slow-motion documentary playing in their heads—the kind where a solemn elder stares at a river while flute music plays in the background. Tommy Pico knows this. He hates it. He’d much rather talk about the greasy bottom of a bucket of Popeyes chicken, a terrible Grindr date, or a late-night text message that went completely ignored.

Pico, who often goes by Teebs, writes poems that read like a manic, blue-light scroll through a smartphone at three in the morning. Born in 1983, he grew up on the Viejas Reservation, which sits right off Interstate 8 in San Diego County. It’s Kumeyaay land. If you've ever driven that stretch of California asphalt, you know the heat is brutal and the landscape is a strange mix of ancient chaparral, casino billboards, and outlet malls. It’s a landscape of survival, cheap plastic, and dust. When he moved to Brooklyn, he didn't leave that friction behind; he just brought it to a colder climate and smashed it against the brick walls of New York.

Let’s jump straight to the television stuff first, because that’s where most people stumble onto his name these days. He wrote for the FX show Reservation Dogs. If you’ve watched it, you already know it has this specific, bruised comedy where characters laugh at things they probably shouldn't. An uncle who talks to ancestral spirits but gets distracted by junk food; teenagers stealing delivery trucks to buy meat pies. That is Pico’s brain on screen. He was in the writer’s room with Sterlin Harjo, helping shape characters like Bear and Willie Jack, but before he was writing scripts for TV, he was doing the exact same work on the page. His poems were never meant to be read in quiet, wood-paneled libraries. They were scripts for staying alive. Which brings us to IRL.

Published in the mid-2010s, IRL is a giant, book-length poem. But if you open it, it looks exactly like a long, vertical text message on your phone. The lines are narrow—literally about the width of a human thumb. The speed of the poem is terrifying. It rushes. Your thumb does the work, scrolling down the page. It’s full of modern shorthand like "b4" and "omg," and it reads like a manic, unfiltered text thread sent to a ghost. It’s about a guy trying to get another guy to text him back, but the poem constantly glitches into something heavier.

Suddenly, you are reading about water rights. You are reading about the privatization of Kumeyaay land. You are reading about the slow, bureaucratic violence of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The brilliance of IRL is that Pico refuses to put these things in different drawers. The stupid, everyday anxiety of modern dating and the historical horror of cultural erasure happen at the exact same time, on the exact same screen.

He spent his twenties doing the corporate grind—wait, no, that was Victoria Chang. (It’s easy to get these two confused if you’re reading them back-to-back, but Pico’s grind was different). He was trying to pay rent in New York while keeping his brain from splitting in half. Then came Nature Poem. The title is a joke, obviously.

"I can’t write a nature poem," he writes, "because it’s redundant."

For Pico, nature is not a weekend park. It’s not a blank canvas for white tourists to have spiritual awakenings in. The Cuyamaca Mountains are gorgeous, sure, but they are also a crime scene. To write a pretty lyric about a pine tree without mentioning the missions, the land theft, and the slaughter of Kumeyaay people is basically a lie. It’s a cover-up. So instead of trees, he writes about bugs, campfires that smell like burning garbage, and wanting his phone charger. It’s petty. It’s hysterical. And it’s deeply political. He is claiming his right to be a modern, complicated, slightly annoying human being who prefers air conditioning over the woods, while still remaining entirely Kumeyaay. Then there’s Junk.

This one is written in sprawling couplets that look like a closet you haven't cleaned out since 2018. It’s a literal inventory of trash. Old T-shirts, bad dates, plastic wrappers, memories of ex-lovers. But he’s also sorting through the historical junk—broken treaties, lost words, the wreckage of assimilation. It's a hoarding exercise as a form of survival. In Kumeyaay tradition, survival meant knowing how to use everything, how to leave nothing behind. Pico takes that ancestral survival mechanism and applies it to the cheap, consumerist trash of the twenty-first century. And he doesn't behave like a quiet, reclusive academic.

He co-hosted Food 4 Thot, a podcast where queer writers talked about sex and books over too much wine. It was messy, vulgar, and brilliant. He did it again with Scream, Queen!, talking about horror movies from a black and brown perspective. Why horror? Because marginalized people already know what it feels like to be hunted. Obviously.

Feed is the last book in that specific cycle. It’s about hunger. He wrote it while he was on an exhausting, endless book tour, traveling from city to city, eating bad airport food, sleeping in sterile hotel rooms. The poem is a giant, shifting menu. Recipes, fast food, traditional Kumeyaay foods, ex-lovers, the search for some kind of spiritual nourishment. How do you feed yourself when you are constantly on display? How do you keep from being consumed by a white audience that wants to eat your trauma for breakfast? You don't. But you try.

Today, Pico has a Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and a stack of other prizes. But the awards are almost an afterthought. What makes him important is his refusal to be a museum piece. He has taken the English language—the tool used to colonize his ancestors—and bent it until it cracked. He remains a poet of the thumb, a writer who understands that the modern world is terrifying and ridiculous and holy all at the same time. He is still out there, writing from the screen, reminding us that the land underneath the concrete is still listening.