A Whale Is a Country (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798987589007)

Isabel Zapata was born in Mexico City in 1984. She studied political science at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York. She is the author of the titles Las noches son así; (Broken English); Alberca vacía/Empty Pool translated by Robin Myers-bilingual edition (Argonáutica / Lumen); Una ballena es un país (Almadía); In vitro (Almadía) [In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation translated by Robin Myers, (Coffee House Press, 2023)]; and Tres animales que caben en el agua (Almadía). Her work has been included in Mexican journals such as la Revista de la Universidad de México, Periódico de poesía, and Letras Libres, among others; and international publications such as World Literature Today and Ancrages (Canada). In 2015 she, along with four friends, founded Ediciones Antílope under the motto, "We make books that we would like to read," and their catalog includes narrative, la crónica, poetry, and essay. She received a 2016-17 grant from FONCA's Jovenes Creadores, a prestigious government program supporting Mexican artists and writers.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish- to-English translator. Her latest book-length translations include In Vitro by Isabel Zapata (2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (2023), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (2022), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022), and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (2022). Other translations have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry and among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). As a poet, Robin's work has been selected for the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology and appears in the The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. Her collections have been published as bilingual English-Spanish editions in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Literary Translation Centre, the Community of Writers, and Under the Volcano.