Born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is the author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, October 2017), selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series. She is also the author of Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 American Book Award. Selected by Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Joy Williams and John Guare as a finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, her work has been published in such journals as New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Guernica.
She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México, to students from all over the Americas in their bilingual (Spanish-English) MFA Program, and affiliated faculty in the Chican@ Studies Program. Winner of the 2015 University of Texas System’s Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, Sasha teaches contemporary American poetry, poetry writing and creative nonfiction writing with research emphases in race, class, immigration and gender.