Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater

Irma Pineda is a Binnizá poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She is the award-winning author of twelve books of bilingual (Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec) poetry. A faculty member at Mexico’s National Teachers’ University, she served as Vice-President of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2020 through 2022. Her first English-language collection, In the Belly of Night and Other Poems, appeared in 2022. More than one hundred of her poems have appeared in U.S. literary journals—including Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, and Two Lines—in Wendy Call’s English translations. Together, Pineda and Call won the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize for Translation, for trilingual poems published in Poetry. She lives in her hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico.  Wendy Call (she/ella) translated Irma Pineda’s In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (2022) and co-translated Mikeas Sánchez’s How to be Good Savage and Other Poems (2023). She is author of the award-winning book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (2011) and co-editor of two anthologies: Telling True Stories (2007) and Best Literary Translations (forthcoming from Deep Vellum, 2024). A 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and 2018-2019 Fulbright scholar in Colombia, she lives in Seattle and Oaxaca.