ABOUT
An award-winning poet and translator, Rosa Alcalá has published several books of her own poems as well as translations of poetry by Latin American writers. YOU, her fourth poetry collection, was published by Coffee House Press in 2024. She has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists Award, a Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellowship from Harvard, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. Her book Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña was runner-up for the PEN Translation Award. Her poems and translations are featured in publications such as Harper’s, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and two volumes of The Best American Poetry. Critical essays on her work appear in American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement; The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of our Time; and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. Recently she served as a Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and is currently a Consulting Editor for the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets Series. She holds the DeWetter Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program.