Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, Penguin, 2024), and Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017). She is a 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. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son.