Brenda Cárdenas

Brenda Cárdenas (she/her) is the author of Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award and silver winner of the 2023 Foreword Review Indie Poetry Awards; Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009); and three chapbooks, including From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005). She coedited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001), which won a Chicago Women in Publishing Award for excellence in editing.

Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, The Library of America Anthology, Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry, Braving the Body, Prairie Schooner, SWIMM Every Day, Good River Review, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, among others.

Cárdenas has collaborated on projects with musicians, visual artists, and choreographers. In 2023, Hal Leonard Music published the score of her poem “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros” set to choral music by composer Daniel Afonso, and the piece was performed in 2024 by the National Concert Choir at Carnegie Hall. Cárdenas contributed to “Mind the Gap,” an ekphrastic portfolio of print/poem exchanges edited by Tim Abel and Sara Parr in 2013. 

In 2009, Kyle Jenkins created a film animation of Cárdenas’s poem “Song” for Poetry Everywhere, and in 2008, Kelly Anderson choreographed a dance to her poem “Sonnet for Thunder Lovers and Primary Colors” for DanceWorks Performance Company. In 2001, with the band Sonido Ink (quieto), Cárdenas recorded the spoken word and music CD Chicano, Illnoize: The Blue Island Sessions (DeSPICable Records).

Cárdenas served as faculty for the 2021 CantoMundo writers’ retreat and as the 2010 Milwaukee Poet Laureate. In 2014, she co-taught the inaugural master workshop for Pintura: Palabra: A Project in Ekphrasis, sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Letras Latinas (Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame). 

Cárdenas is an associate professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she won a University of Wisconsin System Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award and the English Department’s Faculty Graduate Teaching Award. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband, the poet Roberto Harrison, and their dog, Maya.

Of Trace, Urayoan Noel writes, 

In these darkest of days, we are lucky to have the words of a writer as sustaining as Brenda Cárdenas, one who reminds us that poetry has always done the impossible [...] Trace is a triumph of poetry as a liminal practice that works against invisibility and facile legibility, at the threshold of the self, where a new consciousness is possible.

Valerie Martínez writes of Trace, “Cárdenas loves language—each turn of phrase radiates the power of the word to mean, resonate, and transcend. These poems, like a ‘flatbed full of cempazuchil,’ light the way.” Ruth Ellen Kocher writes, “Trace shines light into every corner as Cárdenas reimagines the project of ekphrastic lyric not only as a call and response with the artist and the writer, but also as collective construction that informs the speaker’s vast interiority, thereby creating a treasury of souls who harness the creative and transmuting power of art and language.”