Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Photo courtesy of Vanessa Villarreal
Bio
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, 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, Paris Review, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, theAcademy of American Poets’Poem-a-Day, Buzzfeed Reader, and Poetry Magazine, where her poem “f = [(root) (future)]” was honored with the 2019 Friends of Literature Prize. She is a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and Jack Jones Literary Arts, and is a doctoral candidate in English literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.
Nothing about how I’ve gotten here is easy, or typical. I am the daughter of formerly undocumented immigrants, born in a city split by the border. The cut in the land is an embodied cut, manifesting constant hardship, borders, closed gates, extra labor. When you are shaped by losses, it’s difficult to believe positive things happen too, or that you even deserve them. When I consider the part of the question, “at this point in your career,” all I can think of is how the girl expelled from school, the girl commuting between two retail jobs on a Walmart bike, the girl it took 11 years to finish college, the girl answering ‘sixth grade’ to ‘Parent’s highest education level’ on the FAFSA, could never have imagined herself at this point. It’s one thing to be given scraps for hardship. It’s another to be given an award for what has come of it.
In early 2017, two years after the birth of my son, I began working on my second book, requiring travel to do extensive research of archives and primary sources, some very far away from home. This work, only possible while I was partnered, has been almost completely stalled by single parenthood. And this year, COVID has grounded us all—archives remain closed, travel is deadly, and working parents, particularly women, have had to set their careers aside in the absence of childcare.
So, what does a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts mean at this point in my career? It means I can have one. It means this book, and maybe even more to follow, might be possible. It means I might be possible. It means keep going, even when the world is too much to bear.