Cicatrices

Circe Maia is the author of nine books of poetry, including her collected poems, Obra poética (Rebeka Linke Editoras, 2007). She has also written an autobiographical novel, Un Viaje a Salto (Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, 1987), which was published in a bilingual edition in the U.S. by Swan Isle Press in 2004. In the novel, Maia recounts her experience of the 1972 civic-military dictatorship in Uruguay, in which military police invaded her home and arrested her husband due to his support of the MLN-Tupamaros, leaving Maia behind with the couple’s youngest daughter, to whom she had just given birth. She has lived most of her life in Tacuarembó in northern Uruguay.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of more than eighteen books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest collections include I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Press, 2019), which won the 2017 Dorset Prize in poetry. Her most recent book of fiction is the short story collection Underground Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Kercheval is also a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry, most recently Love Poems/Poemas de amor by Idea Vilariño (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Her essays “Speak Up” and “The Fox Sister” won New Ohio Review ’s 2022 Nonfiction Contest and New Letters ’ 2021 Editor’s Choice Award. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Dan H. Fuller