Vanessa Angélica Villarreal collaged with botanical illustrations, 2022.
NEWS
New Visual Poem: “table {border-collapse: collapse;},” The Nation. June 23, 2022.
OFFICIAL BIO
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 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 Poetry Fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and an essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.
ABOUT
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is a poet, essayist, doctoral candidate, single parent, and first-generation U.S. citizen born in the Rio Grande Valley and raised in Houston, Texas. Formerly labeled an at-risk youth and expelled from the Texas public school system, she is the first in her family to graduate high school, the first to attend college, and the first to graduate with an advanced degree. She earned her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son. Her areas of study are postcolonial and critical race theory, memory studies, affect theory, digital media, visual and documentary poetics, and transnational feminisms, engaging discourses on borders and the affective geographies of memory and fantasy. Read more about her work below.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
The central objective of my work is to recover memory from the absences and silences of migration, colonial erasure, and violence. I’m interested in what can be found, re-animated, and restored in materials, documents, archives, and objects, and how poetic language can reinscribe the fragments of survivor-memory back into the archive.
My grandmother Angélica is a central figure in my work. As the eldest daughter of cotton laborers in Torreón, Mexico, she endured an extraordinarily brutal, unrecorded life that ended as an undocumented, experimental cancer patient at 50 years old. Her life, and early death, are the consequence of state, institutional, and intimate violence, where race, gender, immigration, and class all played a role in creating unsurvivable circumstances. Her survival, strength, and resilience are gifts I have inherited that I now honor through my writing.
The absence of records and memory of my family history drives my academic and scholarly research on postcolonial memory loss, intimate colonialism, the archive, and transnational feminisms, with a special focus on state, medical, institutional, and intimate violence against women of color in the United States.
My first book, Beast Meridian, explores first-generation, queer immigrant daughterhood in the borderlands, and frames the speaker’s struggles with institutional, domestic, and racialized violence through persona poems written in the voice of ancestral animals in the imaginative landscapes of their afterlives.
My forthcoming essay collection, Magical/Realism: the Fantasy/Memory of a Mexican/American Girlhood, set to publish with Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is a collection of essays and autotheory on the affective borders between the U.S. and Mexico, fantasy and memory, explored through critical essays on music, film, television, and video games.
In poetry, I am continuing the archival and visual project of a documentary poetics manuscript that investigates the process of seeking one’s history in the absence of documents, using illustrations and fragments to reproduce the state of dispossession, temporal dislocation, and postcolonial memory loss and reinscribe forgotten histories back into the record.
I am also developing a podcast, along with other narratives that long to be told on-screen. Stay tuned.