Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris. She is the author of Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), Unknowne Land (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), Wale; or, the Corse (Leave Books, 1995), and a recent pamphlet entitled Disturbances in the Ocean of Air (Phylum Press, 2005). She received a MacDowell Residency fellowship March-April 2005, won first prize in the 1998 Stand Magazine International Poetry Competition, the 1999 Frances Jaffer Book Award, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing 1995. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico.