Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Arts Writer Award, a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for numerous other literary and arts prizes, including the prestigious Kurt Brown, Vassar Miller and MAXXI Bvlgari Prize in the Digital Sector.
Caballero is the author of Mammal (forthcoming via Steel Tool Books, 2024); Cortadas (forthcoming from S/W Ediciones, 2025); A Petit Mal (Black Spring Press, 2023); Tryst (Alexandria Publishing, 2022); mid-life (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Reverse Commute (Silver Birch Press, 2014); Entre domingo y domingo (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2023 and 2014).
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Campbell McGrath has written about her work: “It is a rare poet for whom the first comparison that comes to my mind is Anne Carson. Yes, that Anne Carson. But [Caballero’s writing] is of such rigorous thinking, rigorous language, and rigorous thinking-about-language, that it merits the highest praise.”
Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited as fine art at museums and leading international venues, such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, bitforms, Office Impart, Poetry Society of America, Gazelli Art House, New World Center and Times Square. She’s been an artist-in-residence at GAZELL_iO, Glitch, Wild and VERTICAL. She became the first artist to sell a digital poem at live auction in Spain and has released digital poems in partnership with TIME, Diario ABC and Playboy and is currently a contributing writer for Forbes, reporting on Web3 culture.
Widely recognized as a digital poetry pioneer whose own practice is transforming the way language is exhibited, experienced and transacted, she’s also the cofounder of literary gallery theVERSEverse, short-listed for the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award.
Caballero graduated with a magna cum laude degree from Harvard University, where she was awarded a grant by Madrid’s Complutense University to finalize her honors thesis work on the role of the café in sparking cultural revolutions. As an MFA candidate in Poetry at Florida International University she was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize.
She lives in Madrid with her husband and two children.
Cord, from Ana María Caballero’s prize-winning forthcoming book Mammal, probes how the inescapable rhythms of our physicality govern our emotional hungers.
We like to view ourselves as in control, but the reality is that desires we don’t fully understand determine how we relate to ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Metaphysical, spiritual quests are launched from the plane of the sensorial, which hinges on our animalistic need for survival. Intimate relationships, too, are at the mercy of our inborn—and often opposing—longings for both emotional stability and adventure, generating subtle layers of conflict with others that we have difficulty comprehending.
No entity can claim credit for the way our bodies work, and as such any attempt to brandish the body as a weapon is baseless. Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them–without romanticism or preciousness.
The tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it are plumbed in this poem.
Caballero’s verse lifts the veil off romanticized motherhood to challenge notions that present sacrifice as a virtue, giving voice to what is left unsaid in that all important space of the home.