Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the 2019 Whiting Award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A.
In the first week of my doctoral program at the University of Southern California, a senior professor greeted me by name. I was relieved, until he complimented my work: “I really loved the poems in your application, they have a real Latin American, magic realism feel.
The failure of the archive to ever provide an accurate account of history leads her to theorize the practice of “critical fabulation,” the attempt to tell impossible stories by writing with and against the archive to “illuminate the contested character of history … engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices … which weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating the time of slavery as our present.