Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the essay collection Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024), longlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, served as an Art for Justice Fellow with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son.
