Bio

ANA MARÍA CABALLERO is a multidisciplinary, award-winning Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits our societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. The speakers in her poems find their voice by navigating the intellectual and the everyday, daring to name what’s left unsaid in that all-important space of home.  Her poems are moments of private rebellion, made public.

Caballero’s first book of poetry, Entre domingo y domingo, received Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and was second place in the nationwide Ediciones Embajale Prize. Acclaimed international publishing house Valparaíso Press acquired its rights and re-released it in 2023.  She’s published two chapbooks in English. Reverse Commute (2015) was anthologized by Silver Birch Press, and Finishing Line Press published Mid-life (2016) as a standalone chapbook.

Her first nonfiction manuscript, A Petit Mal, was awarded the International Beverly Prize and was published in 2023. It was also a finalist for the Kurt Brown Prize, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Awards, the Essay Press Prize, the Electronic Book Awards, the Split/Lip Press reading cycle and longlisted for the 2022 Memoir Prize. Out of an entry pool of over 2300 applicants, it was named a finalist for the INDIES Forward Review Book of the Year Award.  Mammal, her most recent manuscript, was awarded the 2022 Steel Toe Books Award in Poetry and was published in 2024. It was also a semifinalist for the prestigious Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, designated as a Manuscript of Exceptional Merit by Tupelo Press and a finalist for both The Atticus Review and Driftwood Press reading cycles.  Tryst, a collection of three short stories published in 2022 with Web3 publishing house AlexandriaLabs as a limited edition of 100 NFTs, sold out in under forty-eight hours.  Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has appeared in journals such as the L.A. Review of Books, The Academy of American Poets Magazine, Portland Review, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, Gigantic Sequins and The Southeast Review and reached the final round of consideration in Ploughshare’s Emerging Writers Contest.

She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she was awarded a scholarship by Madrid’s Complutense University to complete her honors thesis work. As a graduate student of Poetry at Florida International University, she was both the winner and runner-up of the Academy of American University Poetry Prize.

Widely recognized as one of the leading figures in digital poetry, she’s the first living poet to sell a poem via Sotheby’s and the first artist ever to be a triple Lumen Prize Finalist. Her work has also been recognized with a MAXXI Bvlgari Finalist Nomination, a Sevens Foundation grant and a Knight Foundation Art  + Tech Fellowship Nomination. 

Recent venue exhibitions include the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, HEK Basel (virtual), the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Málaga, the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, Sotheby’s, Times Square and the New World Center in Miami. 

Her work with poetry on the blockchain is often covered by major media outlets, such as The Art Newspaper, Artnet, NPR, Entrepreneur, Coindesk and Elle UK. 

Caballero has been a speaker at events organized by Fundación Telefónica, Gray Area in San Francisco, DASL London, UNTITLED Art Fairs, the University of the Arts London, Sovereign Nature Institute, O, Miami Poetry Festival, among others. 

She co founded digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.com, where the intrinsic value of poems as works of art is made manifest via blockchain technology.  TheVERSEverse has been shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award. 

Caballero is a contributing writer for Forbes, covering Web3 culture. 

Synopsis

Echo Graph - Video Work, from Caballero’s award-winning book MAMMAL.

In this multi-faceted rendition of self, Caballero expands her acclaimed Literal Litoral series of choreographic poems to place her body where it all begins - the womb. Echo Graph is an exercise in inversion: the poet becomes her creation, the mother replaces her fetus, the patient subverts her doctor’s verdict. 

Though physical failure here is defined by others, namely, a medical face, the vocal delivery and choreographic score question its validity. In Echo Graph, the body transmits the hidden layers of written text to create a rich strata of complementary and contradictory meanings, as often happens in everyday exchanges. 

Recorded via motion-capture technology, this new work continues Caballero’s explorations of how physical movement can translate the spoken-word, using body language to unleash the vital, guttural essence of communication. 

1/1

MP4

3840 x 2160

Credits:

Produced in close collaboration with MadLabs Studios (www.yeswearemad.com/ https://www.instagram.com/yeswearemad

Yoel Meneses - Motion Capture and CG supervisor

Chase Mussey - Visual Effects 

Rafael Teixeira - Sound Design

Bebe - Producer 

Tiger Shokripour - Technical Assistant