About Carmen


Photo by Ricardo Villalobos
Born to a Spanish immigrant father and Irish immigrant mother in the U.S., Carmen Calatayud is a poet and writer from Washington, DC. Carmen's book In the Company of Spirits was chosen as a runner-up for the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets. The book was also a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Carmen is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner, a Best of La Bloga winner and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, and her nonfiction writing and reporting has appeared in publications for nonprofit organizations and at themanifeststation.net.

Carmen was a member of DC Poets Against the War, which was part of the global Poets Against the War movement co-founded by poet Sam Hamill in February 2003. DC Poets Against the War evolved into Split This Rock, an organization that fosters a national network of socially engaged poets.

From 2010 to 2015, Carmen was a poet moderator for Poets Responding to SB 1070, a Facebook group created by the late Francisco X. Alarcón that originally featured poetry and news about SB 1070, the Arizona immigration law that legalized racial profiling to target Latino immigrants. The Poets Responding Facebook page now features a wide range of poetry and human rights news.

Carmen lives and works as a psychotherapist in an underserved area of coastal Georgia near Jacksonville, Florida.




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