Catherine Valdez – Michigan Quarterly Review

Catherine Valdez

Catherine Valdez is a Dominican-American writer, poet, and visual-artist. Her in- progress graphic short story collection about Blackness and food-body relationships, Dinner at my Body, is the recipient of the 2020 The HistoryMakers creative fellowship grant. She is also the author of the chapbook Imperial Debris in Quisqueya and Beyond, which won the 2018 NFSPS Florence Kahn Memorial Award. She is an MFA poetry candidate at the Helen Zell Writers Program and received her B.A. from Columbia University with degrees in psychology and creative writing.

“Can Poetry Hurt Us?”: An Interview with Patricia Smith

I wanted some people that I didn’t personally know either and just thought, well, each one of these people has a mother who may or may not still be with us, who may be forced to still live in the area where they lost their child, someplace that they walk past every day. And they’re out of our hands.

Devil's Lake by Sarah Sala Cover against a pink background

Devil’s Lake: Finding Self at the World’s End

Catherine Valdez

Through the exploration of strained body-self relationships, scientific facts, history, love, loneliness, queerness, and hate, Sala weaves together narratives that ask their readers to consider where they came from, how they are engaging with time— however wrought and distressing— and where they will return to after death.

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