Image 1 of 1
Gina Valdés was born in Los Angeles and grew up on both sides of the United States-Mexico border. Poetry spellbound her at the age of six and the enchantment never left. She received degrees in Writing and Spanish Literature from the University of California, San Diego and has taught Literature and Writing at UCSD, UCDavis, UCLA, the University of Washington, and Colorado College, Her poetry has been widely published in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, in five languages in nine countries. She resides in San Diego near family in the midst of abundant fauna and flora.
“In this evocative collection of poems, Border Duende, Gina Valdés explores the complex intersections of cultural identity, gender, and politics through the lens of the Mexican-American experience. "The border is a wall of barbed lies," she says, giving us a hint on how to read her book. Drawing on childhood memories, family history, and current events, Valdés weaves together a tapestry that is both raw and nuanced. With a powerful voice that resonates long after the final page, Valdés cements her place as a vital voice in contemporary Chicano literature.”
— Agustín Cadena, author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and essays.
“There is a deceptive simplicity in Gina Valdés' poems that opens the reader's heart to their gift of singular wide-angled perspective. Border Duende flows with a tenacious capacity for humor and for tender and deep-rooted compassion—that earthen pot of poetry. The cultural textures these poems offer are rooted in a simple clarity of the validity of variation and the subtle balancing of tensions. The poetic voice as keen observer juxtaposes and shifts kaleidoscopically, speaks for an array of joys, slits, and wounds, for the seeds of light and love, for a geography of cultural crossroads that document the subtle threads of merging. Border Duende brings the reader to the very borders of the poetic, of human life: ‘On my walk on earth / may I walk on earth's edge / sky's rim / where worlds meet.’”
— Claire Joysmith, writer, translator, author of three volumes of poetry, and editor of the anthology Cantar de espejos: Poesía testimonial chicana de mujeres.
“With her duende as guide in her book Border Duende, Gina Valdés takes us on a journey through a land of "contacts and fractures," of deserts, walls, and rivers, where Chaplin and Cantinflas romp and "El Santo wrestles Batman." Engaging language as inventive as the border itself, each poem is a portrayal of life along this international line. She writes, ‘words followed me home,’ the result of that original enchantment is a delicious volume of poetry written ‘under the spell of two tongues.’”
— Olivia Teresa Ruiz Marrujo, poet and comparative scholar of Mexico's northern and southern borders