A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two poetry collections, From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005) and Boomerang (Bilingual Review Press, 2009), as well as the coeditor of Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest. She writes in a blend of English and Spanish, which she has said reflects her interest in “the interconnectedness and juxtapositions of difference and similarity between seemingly disparate peoples, events, places, and experiences.” While Cárdenas often writes in free verse, she also experiments with a variety of forms, and, as Craig Santos Perez has noted, “This syncretic formal impulse reflects the polyphonic texture of Cárdenas’s language-scape.” Her poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (2007) and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was Milwaukee’s poet laureate from 2010 to 2012.
