Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

I’m interested in writing that attempts to reconcile the visible present with the invisible past, writing that confronts the writer and implicates the reader. Writing that acknowledges that it takes imagination to understand reality and that reality itself is a feat of imagination and conviction. 

Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back, from Mad Creek Books, as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in various journals including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus, among others. She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’sDiscovered Voices award, she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow.  

Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas has advised graduate and undergraduate projects, several of which are now books and published works, ranging from lyrical explorations of war and revolution, narrative manuscript confronting disability and sexual assault, to experimental essays about food, culture, country and sexuality. 

• Advanced Essay Workshop. The Great American Essay.  
  An exploration of what literary nonfiction meant to the earliest writers of American literature? What does ‘America’ mean to essayists writing today at the borders of countries, and the edges of society? And what makes the great American essay great, and what American? 
• Technical Seminar. Narrative Pacing.  
  From Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth,” to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and Bechdel’s Fun Home, students will read, discuss and explore the questions: what makes an piece tick and tock? What makes it go where it goes? What keeps us reading on? And then, they will craft their own pieces and test the limits and boundaries of the principles explored.  
• Arts Core. Reading as a Writer: Adaptation as Form 
  There are stories that refuse to die. Narratives that again and again find some continued resonance through years, decades, and centuries, from Joyce Carol Oates’s “Blue Bearded Lover,” to Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella”, to Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice” and Marina Carr’s “By the Bog of Cats.” Each text will be explored both independently and within the context of its adaptive genealogy. Students will read each text carefully, analyze, discuss and respond both academic and creative writing prompts based on assigned texts and class lecture. 

BOOKS

• Essaying the Americas. Essay anthology, editor. Forthcoming from Mad Creek Books. March 2020. 
• Don’t Come Back. Collection of linked lyrical and narrative essays, experimental translations, and reinterpreted myths. Forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press, Mad River Books, 21st Century Essay Books Series, January 2017.
• Drown/Sever/Sing. Collection of essays and short stories. Anomalous Press, March 2015.  
   

IN PERIODICALS & ANTHOLOGIES

• “Borders.” Visual schema. The Believer. Fall 2019. 
• “Family Photo Album.” Poetry Translation, Enrique Noriega. Exchanges. Fall 2019.  
• “Epilogue.” Poetry Translation, Enrique Noriega. Exchanges. Fall 2019. 
• “Shithole of Silks.” Poetry Translation, Enrique Noriega. Exchanges. Fall 2019. 
• “Unicorn in the Water.” Poetry Translation, Lil Marie Herrera. Exchanges. Fall 2019. 
• “I Remake Suicide.” Poetry Translation, Lil Marie Herrera. Exchanges. Fall 2019. 
• “To Be Born a Woman.” Poetry translation, Lourdes Espínola Wiezell. The Sakura review. Fall 2018.  
• “Thinking It Was Something They Could Hunt and Kill.” Essay. The Journal of Speculative Nonfiction. Fall 2018. 
• “Sing Queen City Pain.” Essay. The Oxford American. Fall 2018. 
• “A Practical Guide to Impractical Demons.” Visual schema. The Believer. Fall 2018. 
• 100 Refutations. Essays and poetry translations. Brooklyn Rail & InTranslation. April – July, 2018.  
• 100 days, 100 translations and 100 poets from 29 from Latin American countries.  
• “In Absentia.” Essay. Best of IHLR Prose issue (20th anniversary edition.) Spring 2018.  
• “Whistling.” Essay. The Normal School. Fall 2017.  
• “The Man Walks In and Removes His Hat.” Essay. The LA Review of Books. September 2017. 
• “Tinfoil Astronaut.” Essay. The Sunday Rumpus. November 2016. 
• “Pain Pays the Income of Each Precious Thing.” Essay. Brevity. September 2015.  
• “The Peach Orchard.” Essay. Fourth Genre. Fall 2015