Guadalupe García McCall :: Natalia Treviño

Natalia Treviño is a poet, author, educator and advocate from San Antonio, Texas, whose works center women’s voices and their lived experiences, not just their struggles, hardships, and heartbreaks but also their triumphs, joys, and resilient spirits. Natalia Trevino immigrated to Texas at the age of four and became a Naturalized US Citizen at the age of 15. After high school she went on to receive a BA and an MA in English from the University of Texas in San Antonio and, after many years of teaching in the same city, she went on to pursue and acquire an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska. 

Natalia’s first novel, Drinking the Bee Water, which is out on submission via her agent at this time, is the testimony of an immigrant mother's journey to make a living as a servant in the U.S while separated from her daughter. As a poet and fiction writer, Natalia is the recipient of several awards, most notably the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award in 2004, the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award in 2004, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2008 and the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio in 2012.

I first met Natalia years ago, when I sat next to her during a reading for Sandra Cisneros at the San Antonio Book Festival. I had read her book, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, and was a fan, so I was interested in getting to know her. Her warmth won me over, and we spent a few minutes sharing writing life stories and advice before we went our separate ways. Since then, I’ve spent some time with Natalia on a professional level. First, while delivering a virtual workshop for adults with Voices de la Luna and second while giving a workshop for young adults from the Rio Grande Valley in conjunction with the ReThink Institute with Region One. Natalia was a wonderful hostess, both facilitating my transportation to the RGV and then making sure everything I needed to present my workshop was in place at the venue. She did all this, even though she had her own presentation to give at the ReThink Institute. But that is who Natalia is, a sweet friend, a professional colleague, and a sensitive, gracious hostess and advocate for all writers. In the time since my return to Texas, we’ve become friends, and I’ve come to realize that Natalia is more than involved with her writing community, she is devoted to it heart and soul.

While it is true that she is making a big difference in people’s lives as an Assistant Professor of English at North Vista College in San Antonio, Texas, Natalia is changing lives in many other important ways. Much of Natalia’s spare time in the last 20+ years has been devoted to working with different writing groups and organizations in the San Antonio area in an effort to support, uplift, and celebrate writers. Her tireless work with Gemini Ink, Voices de la Luna, and the Macondo Writers’ Workshop is longstanding and certainly noteworthy, but it is her involvement with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center that illustrates her true gift as a nurturer of writers, specifically young adult writers. Her expansive, decades-long commitment, both in and out of the classroom, speaks of her devotion to Texas writers.

It is easy to see that Natalia excels at life as a friend, advocate, and community leader, but her own writing is also noteworthy, full of compassion, love, and light, the kind of traits that make her shine even more brightly under the Texas sun.

                                                                          ~Guadalupe García McCall
                                                                            Poet, Author, Educator & Advocate

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