Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is a bilingual American poet, essayist, and cultural critic of Mexican descent born in McAllen, Texas, to a mixed-status Mexican immigrant family and raised in Houston. She is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Beast Meridian (2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and other honors, and the essay collection Magical/Realism (2024), longlisted for the National Book Award. A first-generation college graduate with an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder and a PhD from USC (2024), she explores themes of migration, violence, pop culture, and transnational feminism while living in Los Angeles as a single mother.