Tina Escaja


Tina Escaja, also known as Alm@ Pérez, is a Spanish-American writer, activist, feminist scholar and digital artist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and Gender & Women's Studies, and Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Vermont. She is the winner of the International Poetry Prize Dulce María Loynaz, and the National Latino Poetry Award for Young Adults, Isabel Campoy-Alma Flor Ada. She is considered a pioneer in the field of Electronic literature in Spanish.

Life

She earned degrees from the University of Barcelona and the University of Pennsylvania. She serves as President of Feministas Unidas, Inc. and has been President of ALDEEU and the AEGS. She is Corresponding member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language.

Critical Reception

Her creative work has been defined as a crossover between literary writing, digital art, video and multimedia projects.
In the year 2000 she published the hypertextual poem VeloCity, considered a pioneer in the field of digital poetry in Spanish, and one of "the first hypertextual works written by women.”
According to scholars and media critics María Goicoechea and Laura Sánchez, “Hypertext is, for Tina Escaja, the insignia of this new cyberfeminism that proposes a ‘non-essential modern subject’.” The same critics note a change in this perception in Escaja’s project Código de barras, a project based on barcode technology: “now technology is used to compel us to think about a perturbing reality of control and dominion.”
Media critic Maya Zalbidea sees in her interactive hypertextual novel Pinzas de metal an example of electronic Cut-up technique, and also states that “the multilinearity of the story provides the reader a feeling of intrigue and bewilderment.”
Regarding her award-winning poetry collection Caída libre, the writer and critic Sabas Martín finds connections with the innovating poetry of César Vallejo, and the images created by Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral.

Selected exhibitions and anthologies

Escaja’s poetry and digital works have been exhibited in museums and galleries such as the Museum Wolf Vostell Malpartida de Cáceres ; Centro Cultural Okendo ;the BCA Center, the Flynndog Gallery, and the Art Hop in Burlington, Vermont; the Galerie du Centre de Design ;Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Museo Provincial de Lugo, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, and the Mission District Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco.
Her work has been translated into six languages, and has been included in anthologies such as the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3;Escenario de crisis: dramaturgas españolas del nuevo milenio;Tasting Asia: An Anthology of Poems of the 2016 Taipei Poetry Festival;Dos Poemas y un Café: Mujeres poetas visuales II;L'altra Penelope: Antologia di scrittrici di lingua spagnola;Escritores españoles en Estados Unidos;The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2015;Pegasos de dos siglos: Poesía en Kentucky 1977-2007;Que no cesen rumores. Antología poética;Trilogía Poética de las mujeres en Hispanoamérica ; and The WRUV Reader. A Vermont Writers’Anthology;

Poetry collections

Fiction