A Conversation with Natalia Treviño

Experience the Episode

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

How does a childhood chalkboard blossom into a lifelong love of the poetry of words? Listen in to an oral history interview with Natalia Treviño, who explores how a bicultural childhood and deep family devotion to the Virgin Mary forged her powerful artistic voice. In this moving conversation with Therese Konopelski ’20, discover Treviño’s profound connections between personal history, faith, and the writer’s journey, revealing how grief can unlock incredible creativity and spiritual understanding.

Treviño will be in attendance at the upcoming symposium The Art of Encounter: Exploring Spiritual Engagement with Art Objects, which will take place at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame on April 23-24, 2026. The Art of Encounter seeks to stimulate dialogue that connects scholarly study with the lived experience of spiritual engagement with art—particularly in public spaces like museums—to promote a deeper, more vulnerable interaction with art objects and each other. For more information, please visit the symposium website.

For more information on Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

Meet the Poet: Natalia Treviño

Natalia Treviño has won several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Menada Literary Award from the Ditet e Naimet Poetry Festival in Macedonia. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Macondo, and a winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2024 Ambroggio Prize for co-translating Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press). She is the author of When You Were Human (forthcoming Flowersong Press), VirginX (Finishing Line Press), and Lavando la Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press).Her first novel, THE ROAD BACK is forthcoming from Arte Publico Press. Her work has been anthologized in Inheritance of Light: Contemporary Poetry (University of North Texas Press), Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers (Curbstone Press), Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, (University of New Mexico Press), and journals including Poetry, Plume, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Bordersenses, Sugar House Review, and RiverSedge. 

When You Were Human by Natalia Treviño

From the Publisher: This collection of poetry offers readers multiple entry points to discover the Virgin Mary— as the miraculous mother of God and as the archetypal spiritual mother of all. By examining how Mary is introduced to us through prayer candles, car air-fresheners, ritual prayer, legend, and high art, this collection attempts to understand the devotions to Mary that unite people all over the world, especially in Mexico. Mary has over twenty-two thousand identities world-wide, but this collection only scratches the surface of those stories focusing on her as the unifying Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgen de San Juan de Los Lagos, and La Virgen de San Juan del Valle, and these poems meditate on her role as the compassionate, redeeming Mother of God. In a variety of traditions, she is united with nature—as the Goddess of Water, Yemaya, as Creator Goddess Coatlicue, as Tonantzin, as friend, companion, as intercessor, and as the spirit of a fellow human being who has experienced the deepest human suffering, the loss of her criminalized child to the violence of the state. The poems are political, reverent, fresh and varied in style. The collection includes an epilogue in Spanish by Levi Romero and translated by poet Julieta Corpus. The epilogue is a soulful response to the last section of the book, “Bitter Sorrows,” which is an adaptation of the Seven Sorrows of Mary prayercycle, in which Mary’s life story becomes lyric, prayer, gift and mystery.

When You Were Human is part of the Letras Latinas Publishing Collaborative. For more information about or to order When You Were Human, please visit the Flowersong Press website.

Letras Latinas Publishing Collective

This initiative formally names what has existed for years: a constellation of partnerships with independent presses to bring forth literary works by Latinx poets and writers.

Past collaborators included: University of Notre Dame Press for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize: 2005-2024; Bilingual Press for the Canto Cosas series: 2008-2017; Noemi Press for the Akrilica series: 2013-2022; and Red Hen Press for the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize: 2013 – 2021.

Letras Latinas currently partners with Red Hen Press for a curated series: 2023 to the present; Tia Chucha Press for a curated series: 2025 to the present; FlowerSong Press for curated selections in 2024 and 2026, respectively; and Graywolf Press for the forthcoming aforementioned volume, We Come from Everything: Poetry for the 21st Century (2027).