Analía Villagra
Photo by Aaron Kindig
Bio
Analía Villagra’s work appears in Colorado Review, Ecotone, Ploughshares,the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (where she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar), the Tin House Workshop, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is an assistant fiction editor for Split Lip Magazine and lives in Oakland, California.
I did not always dream of becoming a writer. I came to fiction in my early 30s as a way to explore ideas and preoccupations I could not express at my day job. It is the truest part of myself, and yet it must bend and contort to fit whatever space I can make for it—early morning hours, weekends, my treasured vacation days. Thanks to this fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, my writing—impossibly, magically—gets to take center stage. The award will allow me to take more time away from my job in order to finish my novel, a work of historical fiction following three generations of a Paraguayan American family as they navigate identity and belonging, loneliness and regret. I am immensely grateful to the NEA for this support and expression of faith in my work.
I cannot imagine I would have come this far without the care and generosity of my communities—my loving family and the brilliant writers I am lucky to call my friends. I owe so much to them, and now to the NEA too, for the tremendous gift of believing in me.