Judith Santopietro
Photo by by Isadora Romero
Judith Santopietro is a writer, editor, and translator born in the Altas Montañas of Veracruz, Mexico. Santopietro speaks and works primarily in Spanish, though she also speaks Nahuatl. Her work and cultural activism span the topics of migration, Indigenous languages, cultural identity, enforced disappearances, and the war on drugs in Mexico.
Santopietro is the author of two collections of poetry, Tiawanaku: Poemas de la Madre Coqa/ Poems from the Mother Coqa (trans. into English by Ilana Luna, Orca Libros, 2019), a finalist for the 2021 Sarah Maguire International Prize for Poetry in Translation, and Palabras de agua (approximately translated “Words of Water”; Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010). Tiawanaku was also published in Nicaragua by Gigante Press (2024) as a poetic visual essay composed of photographs taken during her time living in Bolivia.
Santopietro’s work has been published in the Anuario de poesía mexicana 2006 (selected by Pura López Colomé, Fondo de Cultura Económica), The Brooklyn Rail, The Sarah Maguire Prize Anthology 2020, Rio Grande Review, Periódico de poesía (UNAM), and as part of the symposium The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States and El Archivo de la Palabra (The Archive of the Word) at the Library of Congress, a collection of audio recordings of 20th and 21st-century Luso-Hispanic poets and writers reading their work.
Santopietro’s co-translations include selected poems by Gabriela Mistral into Nahuatl and Peruvian poet Roxana Crisólogo’s work into English.
She participated in the 2021 project “Narrativas y memorias de la desaparición en México” (approximately translated “Narratives and Memories of the Disappearance in Mexico”), facilitating writing workshops for mothers searching for loved ones who have disappeared.
Santopietro earned a Master of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and has participated in research residencies in The Netherlands, New York City, and Bolivia. She is pursuing an MFA in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Iowa.