Verónica G. Arredondo and Allison A. deFreese

Verónica González Arredondo (Guanajuato, Mexico) holds a PhD in Arts from the Universidad de Guanajuato and a Master’s in Philosophy from the Universidad de Zacatecas. She has received several prestigious Latin American literary awards, including Mexico’s National Ramón López Velarde Prize in Poetry/Premio Nacional de Poesía “Ramón López Velarde,” for her book of poems Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not That Body (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2015) as well as the Dolores Castro Prize /Premio Dolores Castro, an annual prize awarded to a woman writing exceptional and socially conscious work in Spanish, for her book Verde Fuegos de Espíritus/Green Fires of the Spirits (Ayuntamiento de Aguascalientes, 2014). Voracidad, grito y belleza animal/Voraciousness, Screams and Animal Beauty, a book of essays, was also published by Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in 2014. Verónica González Arredondo’s books of verse have previously been translated into, and published in, French and Portuguese. From 2017-2018 she held a FONCA fellowship for younger artists through the Fondo Nacional para la Culturas y las Artes/National Fund for Arts and Culture. “Al aire el cuerpo duele”/“The Body Pains the Wind,” a section in Verónica González Arredondo’s award-winning second book Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not that Body references a line from Dolores Castro’s verse.

Allison A. deFreese is conference chair for the Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters. Her books of verse include Nurdles and Other Poems (2022) and The Night with James Dean and Other Prose Poems (winner of Cathexis Northwest Press’ 2022 Chapbook Competition). Her translation of a short sample from Verónica González Arredondo's book I Am Not That Body won Pub House Books' International Chapbook Competition (Montreal) in 2020, while her translation of González Arredondo's Green Fires of the Spirits was recipient of an NEA Literature Translation grant and published as a bilingual edition by the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla's University Press (Libros BUAP, Puebla, Mexico) in 2022. Her translations of Verónica González Arredondo's poems also appear in Copper Nickel, Harvard Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review. Allison lives in Oregon with several cats.