Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the essay collection Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Dutton Books and Penguin Random House, 2024) and the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017).

She is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son and a loyal dog.