Ilana Luna
Bio
Ilana Luna is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Arizona State University. She is a writer, translator, scholar and cultural promoter whose books include Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (2018) and the co-edition/ translation of Carlos Monsiváis’s feminist writings, with Norma Klahn, Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist: A Critical History of Women, Patriarchy, and Mexican National Discourse (2024). Her translation of Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Madre Coqa (2019) was a 2020 Sarah Maguire Poetry-in-Translation Prize finalist in the UK. Recent books in translation include Juan José Rodinás’s Koan: Underwater (2018) and Giancarlo Huapaya’s Sub Verse Workshop (2020).
Luna has served on the director’s board of Phoenix-based bilingual poetry press Cardboard House Press since 2016, and joined their editorial board in 2023. Along with Mexican poet and Cultural Attaché to the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, Gaspar Orozco, whose work she translates, Luna has coordinated the “Central de poesía” for the LéaLA: The Universidad de Guadalajara’s Spanish Language book fair in Los Angeles since 2021. In 2023, Luna was a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Translation for her co-translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s poetry, with Cheyla Samuelson.