Iliana Rocha earned her Ph.D. in English literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University. Her work has been featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch, among others. Karankawa, her debut collection, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is available through the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is currently the graduate director of creative writing at the University of Central Oklahoma and lives with her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo.
At MacDowell, she worked toward a full-length collection of poetry, currently untitled, centered on, in, and around domestic violence. Most recently, her poems have been featured in Latin American Literature Today, and she has just joined Waxwing Literary Journal as a contributing editor.
