Rosa Alcalá, Walther Maradiegue, and Edwin Lucero Rinza, moderated by Edgar Garcia (Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, University of Chicago English, Creative Writing)
Born in Paterson, NJ to Spanish immigrants, Rosa Alcalá is the author of three books of poetry: Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010), The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (Shearsman Books, 2011), and MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2019; The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them by Stephanie Burt (Harvard UP, 2016); American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, edited by Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy (Wesleyan UP, 2018): and Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, edited by Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez (Counterpath, 2014). Her work as a translator has focused on contemporary Latin American women poets living in the U.S. Most recently, she edited and co-translated Cecilia Vicuña: New & Selected Poems (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a finalist for a PEN Translation Award. She is a Professor in the Bilingual MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Edwin Lucero Rinza was born in the Kañaris district of the Lambayeque region of Peru. He is the fifth of eight siblings, he completed primary and secondary school in the Kañaris district, and he is currently a student of Intercultural Bilingual Education at the San Ignacio de Loyola University. He is an author and editor of poetry, including the Kañaris Quechua verse collection Runapa Ñawin, as well as a promoter of the Quechua language in multicultural contexts.
Walther Maradiegue received his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Northwestern University, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Carleton College. He researches Indigeneity in the Andes as a racial, gendered, and geographical construction, especially foregrounding indigenous notions of territory as an assemblage of sovereign visions of nature and the human. He is also interested in hemispheric indigeneities, as a decolonial critique to modernity and capitalism.