Borderlands Poetry presents Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

The Borderlands Poetry series and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University present a community reading with Beast Meridian author Vanessa Angélica Villarreal on Friday, April 12, 2019 from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore (1738 E McDowell Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85006).

While encouraged, RSVPs are purely for the purposes of monitoring attendance, gauging interest, and communicating information about parking, directions, and other aspects of the event. You do not have to register or RSVP to attend this event. This event is open to the public and free.

For more information on Vanessa's talk, visit our website at http://piper.asu.edu/events.

About the Author

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. Her work has been featured in BuzzFeed, the Academy of American Poets, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and is currently pursuing her doctorate 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.

About Beast Meridian

Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at-risk juvenile, Beast Meridian follows a first-generation Mexican-American girl in crisis surviving the painful experiences of a racialized girlhood, cultural displacement, generational trauma, familial loss, economic struggle, and violence. In turn, this collection radically dreams and imagines a surreal state in which these damages may be recovered, and in which the fragmented self may be remembered and re-membered.