As you read Valladares’ Nortada, it will be good to read it as a book — because as the poems gather themselves through the book they gain poise and wisdom, intensity and mystery. Simplicity and abstraction, experience and beauty, speak wholeheartedly to one another, and to us.
~Jean Valentine, Winner of 2004 National Book Award and New York State Poet Laureate, 2008–2010.
Michelle Valladares writes poems that inspire the deepest reflections we are capable of. Their shapes are beautifully rounded, their gestures are graceful and self-contained, their perceptions are minute and absolutely accurate, and their implications are vast. They disappear into themselves and then reappear at the very edge of thought and feeling. Valladares is an artist who makes transcendence seem not only possible but effortless and inevitable.
~Vijay Seshadri, Winner of 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
In poems shorn to essentials, Michelle Valladares meditates, rages, and blesses the strands of a complex inheritance. Her passionate visions of exile and home extend to the spirit itself.
~Joan Larkin, Academy of American Poets Fellow
Michelle Valladares was awarded “Poet of the Year” by The Americas Poetry Festival of New York. Her poem “Paper and Pearls” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been the poetry editor and contributor of essays on art for Global City Review since 1999. She received a writer’s residency from Hedgebrook. Her poems have been published in Asteri(x), Clockhouse, The Literary Review, North American Review, Fulcrum, Upstreet and The Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, (W.W. Norton) The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians and The New Poetry, Modern English Poems by Indians (Sahitya Akademi).
As an independent filmmaker she co-produced the award winning feature film, O Sertão das Memórias (Landscapes of Memory) Brazil, written and directed by José Araújo, which won Best Latin American Film, Sundance Film Festival, the Wolfgang Staudte Prize/ Independent Forum of New Cinema, Berlin Film Festival, 1997. She co-produced the documentary El Diablo Nunca Duerme (The Devil Never Sleeps) USA/Mexico, directed by Lourdes Portillo which won Distinguished Documentary Award, Independent Documentary Association, 1995. She was the production manager on the feature documentary, Imagining Indians, produced and directed by Hopi filmmaker, Victor Masayesva, Jr. for PBS, which brought attention to indigenous filmmaking in the US.
Valladares teaches poetry and creative writing in the English Department at the City College of New York, CUNY, where she serves as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Visit her online at michelleyasminevalladares.com.
