Sasha Pimentel

Sasha Pimentel - Picador Guest Professor in the winter semester of 2018/19

Born in Manila and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is a Filipina poet and author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017), selected by Gregory Pardlo as a winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series, longlisted for the 2018 PEN America Open Book Award, and Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 American Book Award. A finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature (American Academy of Arts and Letters), her work has been featured in New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour online, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, LitHub, Guernica, New England Review and Crazyhorse, among others.

Winner of the 2015 University of Texas System’s Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, Sasha teaches contemporary American poetry, poetry writing and creative nonfiction writing, with research foci on Asian American, Black, Jewish American, and Latin American poetics at the University of Texas at El Paso. She’s an Associate Professor in a bilingual (Spanish-English) MFA Program to writers from across the Americas in the Department of Creative Writing, and serves as affiliated faculty in the Chican@ Studies Program. Sasha holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno. She lives in El Paso, Texas with her husband, the historian Michael Topp, on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México.