Eloisa Amezcua earned a BA in English from the University of San Diego, where she was the recipient of the Lindsey J. Cropper Award for Creative Writing in Poetry selected by Ilya Kaminsky. In 2014, she completed the MFA program at Emerson College in Boston, MA. She’s received fellowships & scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Workshop, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, & the NY State Summer Writers Institute. Amezcua’s debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, (Shelterbelt Press, 2018). She is the author of three chapbooks: On Not Screaming (Horse Less Press, 2016), Symptoms of Teething, winner of the 2016 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2017), & Mexicamericana (Porkbelly Press, 2017). The founding editor-in-chief of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry, Associate Poetry Editor at Honeysuckle Press, & founder of Costura Creative.
On June 16, she will participate in an event at Two Dollar Radio Bookstore in Columbus, Ohio as part of our Poetry to the People book truck tour with Narrative 4. This 10-day, 10-city, 1800-mile journey from New York to New Orleans, will feature stops along the way to give away free books, highlight and celebrate local writers, and promote literacy and literary organizations. To support the trip, please visit our fundraising page here.
1) Please tell us about your most recent project.
My most recent project is a collection of poems based on the life of two-time world boxing champion “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. Weaving together three voices, Bobby’s, Valorie’s, and a narrator’s, the poems confront the idea that the distance between love and violence is narrow.