Ana Maria Caballero

Ana Maria Caballero (b. 1981) is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits our societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticised motherhood and questioning notions that package female sacrifice as a virtue. The speakers in her poems find their voice by navigating the intellectual and the every day, daring to name what’s left unsaid in that all-important space of the home. Her poems are moments of private rebellion made public.

Her first book of poetry, Entre domingo y domingo, received Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and was second place in the nationwide Ediciones Embajales Prize. She’s published two chapbooks in English. Reverse Commute was anthologised by Silver Birch Press, and Finishing Line Press published Mid-life, a standalone chapbook.

Her first nonfiction manuscript A Petit Mal was awarded the International Beverly Prize and will be published in 2022. It was also a finalist for the Kurt Brown Prize, the Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Awards, the Essay Press Prize, and the Split/Lip Press reading cycle and longlisted for the 2022 Memoir Prize. Mammal, her most recent manuscript, was designated as a Manuscript of Exceptional Merit by Tupelo Press.

Her Pushcart Prize-nominated work has appeared in journals such as the L.A. Review of Books, Portland Review, Sundog Lit, Tupelo Quarterly, Gigantic Sequins, and The Southeast Review and reached the final round of consideration in Ploughshare’s Emerging Writer Contest.

She graduated with a magna cum laude degree from Harvard University, where she was awarded a scholarship by Madrid’s Complutense University to complete her honours thesis work. As a graduate student of Poetry at Florida International University, she was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Prize.

Her digital poems have been recognised with a Sevens Foundation grant, featured by the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art and the Digital Francisco Carolinum, sold at a live auction, and exhibited in Times Square, London, Paris, and Brussels, among other venues. She was a Vertical Crypto Artist-in-Residence and will complete a GAZELL.iO Residency in the Fall of 2022.

Her work with poetry on the blockchain has been covered by major media outlets, such as ARTnews, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Elle UK. Caballero has been a speaker at events organised by the University of the Arts London, Sovereign Nature Institute, NFT NYC, the International Women of Blockchain Conference, O, Miami Poetry Festival, NFT CON, Stacks Foundation’s Web3Week and Time Out Market.

She co-founded literary NFT gallery theVERSEverse.com, where the intrinsic value of poems as works of art is made manifest via blockchain technology.