SELFHOOD, SPACE & THE DEEP COMPASSION OF POETRY

ANA MARIA CABALLERO is an award-winning 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 is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the International Beverly Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, a Future Art Writers Award, and a Sevens Foundation grant. In 2024, Caballero became the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and sold the first digital poem via live auction in Spain. Her Pushcart Prize- and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited at fine art museums and leading international venues, such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, Bitforms Gallery, Office Impart, Poetry Society of America, Gazelli Art House, New World Center, and Times Square. The author of six books, Caballero also co-founded the digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.

JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY (he/him) is a Black queer poet, storyteller, first-generation United Statesian, and the author of two collections of poems: original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press), which received a 2021 Housatonic Book Award, and Bound: Poems (Persea Books). He is currently at work on a collection of essays, an excerpt of which received the 2023 First Pages Prize for creative nonfiction. Arriola-Headley lives with his husband in South Florida, on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands.