Carmen Calatayud

Carmen Calatayud was born in the U.S to immigrant war survivors, a Spanish father and Irish mother. Her book In the Company of Spirits was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and was an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. Her poetry has appeared in print and online in journals such as Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Virginia Quarterly Review and Verse Daily, and numerous anthologies. She is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. Carmen is a somatic psychotherapist and DC native who lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Sample Poem

Tale from Chiapas                                                  

In this country, we count the trees, then count again.
We lift the streets by mixing paint.
Nine guardians live upstairs and we sing with them.
There’s a slit in the sky and we reach through to pull down the sun.
We weave bluegreen patterns as we have dreamed them.
At times, tricky spirits swallow our eyes.
They bring bad news like the black moths.
We open the coffin, smell el alma during the wind.
We wait for angels in the cave.
Little stones line the path that measures nothing.
Trotting donkeys knock on doors to whisper the tale.
This voice is our constant companion.
We point to the northern sky before sleep smokes our limbs.
Fig trees spin into ash, and we wash our soil with milk

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Praise for In the Company of Spirits

“In the Company of Spirits is a collection to be devoured on the first read, savored on the second, and taken deep into the heart on the third, the fourth, and beyond.”

—Naomi Benaron, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction for Running the Rift

“The gaze in these poems is unflinching, as well as drenched with imagination. In the Company of Spirits will indeed enrich the ever-expanding mosaic of Latino/a poetry.”

—Francisco Aragón, author of Glow of Our Sweat and Puerto del Sol

“The poems in In the Company of Spirits journey to the borderlands—between nations, languages, people, the living and dead . . . . Gorgeous, hurting, heartbreaking: these are the poems I’ll take on my own journey toward truth.”

—Sarah Browning, author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden

“Carmen Calatayud’s poems are ‘love stories from the ruins.’ Unflinching and brave, her language winds through the wreckage of war zones and borderlands, but it also pauses to praise and to question the human heart.”

—Eduardo C. Corral, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Slow Lightning

“Carmen Calatayud’s courageous poems not only sing, but talk straight from the heart about love and death, the everyday as well as the inexplicable . . . . It is this fearless desire to tell the truth that makes the poems in In the Company of Spirits matter.”

—Devreaux Baker, winner of the 2011 PEN Oakland award for Red Willow People