Andrea Chapela

Andrea Chapela (born 1990, Mexico City) is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is best known for her science fiction and fantasy.
== Life and Education ==
Chapela holds a degree in Chemistry from the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and an Master of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing from University of Iowa. She is also an alumna of the Clarion West Writers Workshop for fantasy and science fiction, class of 2017. She lived for two years in the famed Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where she was given a grant to work on an essay collection, and has been a FONCA scholar twice (2016-2017 for stories and 2019-2020 for novels). 
== Science Fiction and Fantasy ==
The four books of Chapela's YA fantasy tetralogy Vâudïz (La heredera, El creador, La cuentista and El cuento) were published between 2009 and 2015 by the publishing house Urano. In 2016, Chapela was awarded a Jóvenes Creadores grant for a science fiction short story collection. Some of these stories have been published in Samovar, Tierra Adentro, and Alucinadas IV, a Spanish anthology. 
The short story collection Un año de servicio a la habitación was pubished by UDG in 2019, and won the National Juan José Arreola Literature Prize.
In that same year, Chapela received the Gilberto Owen National Prize for Literature in Mexico for the short story collection Ansibles, perfiladores y otras máquinas de ingenio. The book was published by Almadía in 2020. According to Indent Literary Agency, "These ten stories take place in futures where a collection of devices like pings, ansibles, lenses, profilers, or sensory curtains—some of these installed within the human body—allow people to link their minds in a digital cloud, share their thoughts and memories, filter their perceptions, or calculate the success of a romance while they eat basket tacos or navigate the streets of a Mexico City that is completely covered by water. With devastating intelligence, Andrea Chapela confronts her protagonists with realities where scientific knowledge, cutting-edge technology, and daily life interact in ways that are increasingly intricate and inevitable, so that even in the privacy of their minds, the voice of their own conscience no longer reigns." 
== Nonfiction ==
Chapela regularly contributes to literary magazines like Este País, Literal Magazine, Vaso Cósmico, and Tierra Adentro. 
Her essay collection Grados de miopía [The Visible Unseen] won the José Luis Martínez National Prize in Mexico for essays by young writers. The book is a lyrical essay, published by Tierra Adentro in fall 2019. Luis Jorge Boone of Tierra Adentro says of the collection: "[Chapela's] method is exchanging lyrical doubt with personal experimentation, allowing knowledge to become a metaphor and everyday experiences to mark the course of curiosity.”
== Publication in English Translation ==
As of 2021, Chapela is represented by Indent Literary Agency, based in New York.
Some of the poems from her MFA thesis have been translated into English and published in the Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, and selections of her nonfiction and science fiction have also been published in English translation, including the short story "The Person You are Trying to Reach is Not Available." The first essay in her nonfiction collection Grados de miopía was published in English translation in the journal Tupelo Quarterly.
== Bibliography ==
* La heredera (Book 1 of the tetralogy Vâudïz), 2008
* El creador (Book 2 of the tetralogy Vâudïz), 2009
* La cuentista (Book 3 of the tetralogy Vâudïz), 2012
* El cuento (Book 4 of the tetralogy Vâudïz), 2015
* Un año de servicio a la habitación, 2019 
* Grados de miopía, 2019
* Ansibles, perfiladores y otras máquinas de ingenio, 2020
Category:1990 births
Category:Fiction writers
Category:Mexican poets