Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a 2017 Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her doctorate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.