Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (born in Rio Grande Valley) is a bilingual American poet, essayist, and cultural critic of Mexican descent, whose work focuses on first-generation immigrant experience, pop culture, hybrid experimental and visual poetry, and transnational feminist documentary poetics. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and in 2019, she won a Whiting Award for poetry. She was also a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist for her book, Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017).