A proud product of Springfield (MA) Public Schools in an era when a well-rounded education automatically included the arts, multilingual Puerto Rican poet María Luisa Arroyo was educated further at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA), and Harvard (ABD) in German language and literature. 

In July 2015, Ms. Arroyo also earned an MFA in creative writing at Pine Manor College.

Many of Ms. Arroyo's poems, published widely in journals such as Calyx or in anthologies such as Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, negotiate the oftentimes hidden, ignored, or rationalized realities of childhood abuse and domestic violence.

A 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellow and the inaugural 2014 Poet Laureate of Springfield, Ms. Arroyo had her first collection of poems, Gathering Words/Recogiendo Palabras, published by Bilingual Press. She is also co-editor with nationally acclaimed poet and playwright Magdalena Gómez of the first multicultural, inter-generational anthology about bullying, Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (Skyhorse Publishing: 2012).