Rate My Professor Rosa Alcala

Rosa Alcalá is a professor of Literature at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she serves as chair of the Department of Creative Writing and holds the DeWetter Endowed Chair in Poetry in the Bilingual MFA Program. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and her PhD in English from the University at Buffalo. Alcalá's academic interests include 20th-century poetry in English and Spanish, literary translation, Latin American poetry, Spanish poetry, contemporary poetry, and U.S. poetry. She has presented readings, talks, and workshops across the United States as well as in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Tbilisi, Georgia. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Montenegrin.

Alcalá has published four books of poetry: YOU (Coffee House Press, 2024), MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017), The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (Shearsman Books, 2012), and Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010). Notable translations include co-translator of New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018) and Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, runner-up for the PEN Translation Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine (December 2022 issue), The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and two volumes of The Best American Poetry. Essays on her poetry feature in American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of our Time, and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. She is Consulting Editor for the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets Series and served as Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Alcalá has received the 2023 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists ($45,000), Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellowship from Harvard (2023-2024) for “Beyond Opposing Pages: Poets and Their Translators in Performance,” and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, underscoring her influence in poetry and translation.