Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (born in Rio Grande Valley) is a bilingual American poet, essayist, and cultural critic of Mexican descent, whose work focuses on first-generation immigrant experience, pop culture, hybrid experimental and visual poetry, and transnational feminist documentary poetics.

Vanessa Angelica Villarreal from the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellows 2021 Announcement

She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing[1] and in 2019, she won a Whiting Award[2] for poetry. She was also a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist for her book, Beast Meridian[3] (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017).[4]

She is a CantoMundo Fellow and is pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.[5][6][7] She was a mentor for PEN Emerging Voices 2020.

Her work has appeared in major media outlets and magazines including The Cut,[8] Oxford American,[9] The Academy of American Poets,[10] POETRY magazine,[11] Harper's Bazaar,[12] BuzzFeed,[13] The Boston Review,[14] and The New York Times,[15] among others.

Education and early life

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in McAllen, Texas to a mixed-status Mexican immigrant family, and descendants of indigenous cotton laborers in Northern Mexico. She moved to Houston, Texas at five years old, where her maternal grandmother could receive no-cost medical care for cervical cancer at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Her mother is a florist, and her father Gilberto Villarreal is a rock in español and cumbia guitarist who has played with bands such as Canela India, Los Super Villahnos, Fito Olivares, Sabiduria Norteña, Rolando Becerra, and others.[16] Her family are notable influences on her life and work. The death of her maternal grandmother, and her experiences of racist, sexist, and homophobic discrimination in the Texas public school system, led to troubled preteen and adolescent years and psychiatric hospitalization, which she writes about in her award-winning book, Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017).

She is a first-generation college student, attending the University of Houston and several community colleges from 2000-2011 while working multiple retail and food service jobs. She graduated summa cum laude in 2011. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2014 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is currently pursuing her doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.

Career and writing

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's writing is noted for its experimental, visual, and hybrid forms, including multimedia performances and video. She attributes her experimentation to growing up in a bilingual Mexican/American household among working-class musicians and immigrants in Houston and the borderlands. Her work uses the language of institutional and state and documents, archives, music, pop culture, science, and medicine to restore land and memory to its state before the colonial encounter, reanimate the ghosts of migration, and interrogate medical, state, and intimate state violence. She is "interested in what can be found, animated, and restored in the remains of violence, and how poetry and language can record the fragments of survivor-memory and fill the spaces between documents, photos, artifacts, and objects."[17] In 2019, the Whiting Award Selection Committee wrote of her work, "The poems of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal transport readers into a wilderness, a porous border world of dual (or multiple) identities. Visually striking, rooted in the borderlands, Beast Meridian is a fiercely feminist book that refuses easy closure and answers. The lines blaze with anger and empathy, and the craft astonishes. Beast Meridian will serve as an example of what’s possible in American poetry in the twenty-first century. In a word: gorgeous."[18]

External video
video icon "Exercise in the Face of Divorce (after David Campos). The Rumpus, April 2018."
video icon "Estrellada, from Beast Meridian. Apogee, March 2017.

She is also an essayist and cultural critic, and has published criticism and personal essays with a feminist and critical race lens on RuPaul's Drag Race,[19] VIDA,[20] Selena: The Series,[21] and The Witcher 3:Wild Hunt.[22] Her essay and cultural criticism collection on race, gender, and fantasy is forthcoming in 2023 from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Plume/Dutton and Penguin Random House.

Personal life

Villarreal is a single mother and doctoral student currently living in Los Angeles, California. From 2019-2021, she was an Arts for Justice Fellow with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, where she dedicated her time to abolitionist groups and efforts, and advocated for migrant mothers, women, children, and incarcerated adolescent girls.

Awards and honors
  • 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship [23]
  • 2019-2021 University of Arizona Art for Justice Fellowship[24]
  • 2019 Whiting Award, Poetry[25]
  • 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Finalist[26]
  • 2019 Friends of Literature Prize, POETRY Magazine[27]
  • 2018 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry, Texas Institute of Letters[28]

Works
  • Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017) ISBN 9781934819654
  • Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) ISBN 0819579580
  • Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (A Wave Blue World Inc, 2021) ISBN 1949518132

References
  1. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". www.arts.gov. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  2. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". www.whiting.org. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  3. "Beast Meridian By Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Noemi Press". Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  4. "Building New Traditions: A Conversation with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". Tufts Poetry Awards. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  5. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | College of Arts & Sciences". www.ashland.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  6. Poets, Academy of American. "About Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Academy of American Poets". poets.org. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  7. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". Poetry Foundation. 2021-02-11. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  8. Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica (2021-12-10). "The Fantasy of Healing". The Cut. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  9. "Oxford American | La Cancion de la Nena". www.oxfordamerican.org. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  10. Poets, Academy of American. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Academy of American Poets". poets.org. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  11. Foundation, Poetry (2021-02-12). "f = [(root) (future)] by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". Poetry Magazine. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  12. Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica (2020-12-10). "'Selena: The Series' Falls Short of Representing the Full, Diverse Latinx Experience". Harper's BAZAAR. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  13. "Valentina's Downfall On "RuPaul's Drag Race" Revealed Some Ugly Truths About The Show". BuzzFeed News. 25 September 2017. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  14. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". Boston Review. 2018-04-28. Retrieved 2021-02-12.
  15. Queen, Khadijah; Weise, Jillian (2019-05-19). "Opinion | 'Make No Apologies for Yourself'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  16. "Oxford American | La Cancion de la Nena". www.oxfordamerican.org. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  17. "About". VANESSA ANGÉLICA VILLARREAL. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  18. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". www.whiting.org. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  19. "Valentina's Downfall On "RuPaul's Drag Race" Revealed Some Ugly Truths About The Show". BuzzFeed News. 25 September 2017. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  20. ""Vida" Lets Its Latinx Characters Experience Sex And Pleasure". BuzzFeed News. 18 July 2018. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  21. Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica (2020-12-10). "'Selena: The Series' Falls Short of Representing the Full, Diverse Latinx Experience". Harper's BAZAAR. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  22. Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica (2021-12-10). "The Fantasy of Healing". The Cut. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  23. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". www.arts.gov. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  24. "Art For Justice". Poetry Center. 2020-09-17. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  25. "Vanessa Angélica Villarreal". www.whiting.org. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  26. "Winners & Finalists". Tufts Poetry Awards. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  27. "Poetry Magazine Prizes". Poetry Foundation. 2022-02-11. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
  28. Villarreal, Vanessa (2021). "Texas Institute of Letters: Awards 1936-2021 [PDF]" (PDF). Texas Institute of Letters.
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