Irma Pineda Author

Irma Pineda is the author of essays on indigenous cultures and several bilingual poetry collections (Zapotec-Spanish). Her work, translated into English by Wendy Call, appears in magazines such as Poetry Magazine and the Chicago Review. In addition to English, her poems have been translated into Estonian, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, German and Chinese.She has held residencies at the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center at the University of Washington; The Banff Center of the Arts in Alberta, Canada; and at the Calles y Sueños House of Art and Culture in Chicago. She was a fellow of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in Mexico. From 2020-2022, she was elected a member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Wendy Call is co-editor of the craft anthology Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide and author of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize and a Gold Medal from the International Latino Book Awards. More than one hundred of her translations of Irma Pineda’s poems have appeared in magazines and literary journals, while the trilingual collection In the Belly of Night and Other Poems was co-published by Pluralia and Song Bridge in 2022. Her honors include being a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia, earning translation felllowships from Cornell University’s Institute of Comparative Modernities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and serving as Artist in Residence at two dozen institutions, including Harborview Medical Center, Hedgebrook, New College of Florida, Seattle University, and five national parks. Wendy teaches nonfiction in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program and makes her home in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, on Zapotec and Mixtec land.