MARGARITA MERINO (León, “Winter Capital,” Spain, lives in the USA). She is a poet, professor, designer, columnist, and illustrator. She holds a degree in Political Science and Sociology and a PhD in Hispanic Literature (Florida State University, 1999). Her thesis was titled Ambiguity and Certainty in the Poetic “Ages” of Antonio Gamoneda (published years later [2021] with an extensive interview with Gamoneda). She has published the poetry collections Journey to the Interior (1986), Ballads of the Abyss (1989), Cloister Poems 1 and 18 (in collaboration with the León poets Juan Carlos Mestre and Adolfo A. Ares), Wounded Falcon (1993), Demon vs. Archangel (1999), the Italian anthology The Lady of the Gale (translated by Emilio Coco), and Journey to the Exterior (in María Cruz Rodríguez González: From Confession to Ecology: The Poetic Journey of Margarita Merino, 2016, who considers her a precursor of ecofeminism in Spain); Proclamation of a Piñata Saturday (with explanation and cat) (2018); The Chest of Canvases: Poems of the Skin (2022), From the Empty City. (Raccoon Manifesto) (2022).
Her work has been considered "total poetry" by leading critics (Gullón, Lliteras, Balcells, and JE Martínez, among others). She has been included in worldwide anthologies and in Ghosh’s volume: Republic of Words: Conversations with Creative Minds from Around the World. In Cuadernos de Aldeeu (ed. A. Román) and Puente Atlántico del siglo XXI (co-published by her since 2024), you can read some of her essays on contemporary peninsular literature (Gamoneda), Latin American literature (Borges), the comparison between literature and cinema, colonial literature (Cabeza de Vaca), a contemporary vision of the picaresque, the Golden Age, and short stories and poems. The poet asks: “Let us defend the beauty of the world.”