Bio

Carmen Calatayud (she/her) is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and Irish mother. She is the author of two poetry collections, This Tangled Body (FlowerSong Press/Letras Latinas, 2024) and In the Company of Spirits (Press 53, 2012), which was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. Her poetry has appeared in or is upcoming in journals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Banyan Review, Cutthroat, Poet Lore, POETRY Magazine, Rogue Agent, Tahoma Literary Journal, Verse Daily and numerous anthologies.

She is a Larry Neal Award Winner, a Best of La Bloga winner, and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. Calatayud is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, a Macondo Writers Workshop fellow, and an editorial staff member for The Skinny Poetry Journal.

In 2002, after relocating from Tucson to the DC area, Calatayud became active with DC Poets Against the War, a chapter of the national Poets Against the War movement founded by poet Sam Hamill in the wake of the Iraq War. Along with other DC poets, she devoted time to peace and social justice activism through poetry readings, marches and events. As DC Poets Against the War evolved into Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008, a national organization that fosters a nationwide network of socially engaged poets, she volunteered with them until 2016.

In 2010, Calatayud was selected by poet Francisco X. Alarcón to be a poet moderator for Poets Responding to SB 1070, a Facebook group Alarcón created as part of the immigrant, migrant and refugee rights movement to combat Arizona’s “papers please” racial profiling law SB1070. The original group of six poets engaged in poetry readings, daily online engagement, marches and national presentations until Alarcón’s death in 2016.

Calatayud lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she works as a community mental health clinician specializing in somatic and creative approaches for trauma and grief.