Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, Longlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Beast Meridian, which was a 2019 Whiting Award winner, a 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. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, 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.