2021 Award Recipient - Victoria Blanco
The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers has chosen Victoria Blanco of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as the recipient of the sixteenth annual Desert Writers Award. A grant of $5,000 will support work on her book proposal, titled “Up from the Desert.”
Ms. Blanco, a west Texas native, is a 2014 graduate of the University of Minnesota Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Texas Observer, Catapult, Fourth Genre, and The New York Times. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Out of the Sierra, to be published by Coffee House Press.
Ms. Blanco said, “My first book was born out of a desire to understand my family’s Indigenous heritage and the Mexican people’s Indigenous identity.” Much of the book focuses on the Rarámuri people, also known as the Tarahumara, one of the original peoples of the Chihuahua Desert. Based on three years of field research, Out of the Sierra, according to Ms. Blanco, “seeks to elevate the voices of a displaced people and interrogate the systems and history that cause their displacement and poverty.”
The grant offered by the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Fund will support research for Ms. Blanco’s second book. According to Ms. Blanco, Up from the Desert, also set in Chihuahua, Mexico, as well as the region surrounding El Paso, Texas, “will explore ways that maintaining ancestral connections to land can help restore the earth.”
In her grant application, Ms. Blanco wrote, “Despite the destruction of the Río Grande and the assimilation of Indigenous and mestizo farmers into factory jobs, Indigenous cultures are alive and continuing to shape the borderlands. I see the borderlands and these recent events as formative to my writing practice, as they helped me to see my fronteriza identity as intimately tied to the desert, not just the border.”
As Ms. Blanco explains, the term “fronteriza” refers to “people who see border crossing as a way of life.”
Although still a young and emerging writer, Ms. Blanco has already received a host of grants and awards for her work. In 2010 as she was beginning her research for her first book, Ms. Blanco received a $13,000 Fulbright All-Disciplines Research Grant. She has also won a Minnesota State Arts Board Award, and the Roxanne Gay Fellowship in Nonfiction to attend a two-week literary arts retreat for women writers of color.
In a statement she wrote in response to hearing news of her winning the 2021 grant, Ms. Blanco said, “It fills me with joy to have my work recognized by the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award. I've always suspected that my hometowns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are defined by so much more than the border. The Chihuahuan Desert, and the cultures born of the desert, unite us. I'm excited to begin field research in the Chihuahuan Desert for my second book, and am thankful to the board for choosing my project to support.”
In addition to Ms. Blanco, two other applicants qualified as finalists in the 2021 contest: Mark Sundeen of Moab, Utah, for a project titled “Delusions and Grandeur,” and Chris Rush of Tucson, Arizona, for “Blue Tent.”
A group of six Meloy Fund board members comprised the 2021 Awards Committee. They included Don Snow and Jake Lodato, both from Washington State; Kendra Atleework of Bishop, California; Jullianne Ballou of Austin, Texas; Michael Branch of Reno, Nevada, and Edie Lush of London, England.
The Ellen Meloy Fund supports writers whose work reflects the spirit and passion for the desert embodied in Meloy’s writing and in her commitment to a “deep map of place.” Before her untimely death in 2004, Meloy published four books, numerous articles, and radio commentaries. Her last book, Eating Stone, won the John Burroughs Association Medal for 2007. An earlier work, The Anthropology of Turquoise, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.