San Antonio Book Festival - Natalia Treviño
Photo Courtesy of Angie Contini
Book Festival Author

Natalia Treviño

Natalia Treviño has won several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Menada Literary Award from the Ditet e Naimit Poetry Festival in North Macedonia. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Macondo Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Academy of American Poets Ambroggio Prize for cotranslating Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours. She is the author of VirginX and Lavando la Dirty Laundry. Her work has been anthologized in Inheritance of Light: Contemporary Poetry; Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers; Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry; and published in journals including Poetry, Plume, The Southern Poetry Anthology, BorderSenses, Sugar House Review, and riverSedge

She is joining us at the Book Festival for her two new books: a novel, The Road Back, and a poetry collection, When You Were Human

More About Natalia Treviño

  • When You Were Human

    This collection of poetry offers readers multiple entry points to discover the Virgin Mary— as the miraculous mother of God and as the archetypal spiritual mother of all. By examining how Mary is introduced to us through prayer candles, car air-fresheners, ritual prayer, legend, and high art, this collection attempts to understand the devotions to Mary that unite people all over the world, especially in Mexico. Mary has over twenty-two thousand identities world-wide, but this collection only scratches the surface of those stories focusing on her as the unifying Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgen de San Juan de Los Lagos, and La Virgen de San Juan del Valle, and these poems meditate on her role as the compassionate, redeeming Mother of God. In a variety of traditions, she is united with nature—as the Goddess of Water, Yemaya, as Creator Goddess Coatlicue, as Tonantzin, as friend, companion, as intercessor, and as the spirit of a fellow human being who has experienced the deepest human suffering, the loss of her criminalized child to the violence of the state. The poems are political, reverent, fresh and varied in style. The collection includes an epilogue in Spanish by Levi Romero and translated by poet Julieta Corpus. The epilogue is a soulful response to the last section of the book, “Bitter Sorrows,” which is an adaptation of the "Seven Sorrows of Mary" prayercycle, in which Mary’s life story becomes lyric, prayer, gift and mystery.


  • The Road Back

    Two years for two thousand dollars. That’s the agreement Berta made with the wealthy Thompson family in San Antonio. That amount of money would change everything for herself and her toddler Josefina, whom she left under the care of Amá and Apá in rural Lagos de Aves, south of the border. But life as a domestic worker is not easy; la Señora is demanding, mercurial and manipulative, and without legal documentation, there’s nothing Berta can do about her employer’s decision to withhold payments until her commitment is fulfilled.

    Her existence in the Thompson household grows more precarious through a budding relationship with la Señora’s rebellious teenage son. When she discovers their connection and threatens to send Berta away with nothing, Berta packs her bags—taking not the money she has earned but a trampled and steady dream. Together, the young couple heads to California where they both find work, Aaron in a small tire shop and Berta in the fields of the Coachella Valley.

    Berta’s journey through the present is haunted by memories from her past: a “wedding that was not a wedding, only sadness” to Josefina’s father; asking her parents to care for her child while she is gone; and walking alone in the desert, injured and abandoned by the man who was paid to take her across the border. Laying bare the disorienting blend of hope and exploitation many immigrant women experience, Natalia Treviño’s novel, complemented by striking cover art from Celeste De Luna, is both a modern migration odyssey and a meditation on the cost of dreaming across borders.

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