Iliana Rocha is originally from the Southeast region of Texas, and her family is one of Mexican immigrants. She is the 2019 winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry for her newest collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, selected by Oliver de la Paz, available from Tupelo Press. Karankawa, her debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Joy Harjo, and is available through University of Pittsburgh Press. Both collections explore and interrogate familial historicity and narrative, as well as, particularly, the slippery qualities of identity, with the Tejano landscape as an ever-looming presence. Borders, according to Gloria Anzaldúa, are imaginary, generative, transformative, and creative spaces.

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez chronicles Rocha’s obsession with the 1971 shooting death of her grandfather in Detroit, Michigan. Because the details of his death were (and are) terribly unclear, part of how her family kept him alive was to share the different iterations they heard: a bar fight, a drug deal gone wrong, a jealous husband, a street brawl, an overzealous police officer, and a New Year’s celebration—to name a few. The book is framed around these various accounts, as the speakers attempt to reconfigure a past mysterious and tenuous, clouded by distance, language, and time. Situated alongside the titular Inocencio poems are others that explore the so-called “justice system,” the true crime genre, and obsessive tabloid culture. Genre and form are also destabilized through prose poems, deconstructed villanelles, and the recursive Inocencio thread.

Her current work in progress is OURS, a docupoetic collection that examines domestic violence against women of color. While Rocha reconciles her own experiences with a near-death assault by an intimate partner, she also features Irene Garza, Rosemary Diaz, Gabriela Gonzalez, Vanessa Guillén, Ana Fernanda Bazaldua Ruiz, and Reyna Angélica Marroquín, to name a few, establishing a morbid community of women who have, tragically, been subjected to gender-based violence. In The Danger of “No”: Rejection Violence, Toxic Masculinity and Violence Against Women, Lily Thacker identifies the patriarchal structures that permit and perpetuate such a national crisis. Thacker’s scholarly recognition of toxic masculinity; entitlement and narcissism; misogynistic, violent language and rhetoric; incel attitudes; and the failure of perpetrators to acknowledge a woman’s subjecthood is a vital step in the research, especially considering the dramatic uptick in intimate partner violence since the onset of COVID-19 and the latest, and even more destructive, emerging pattern of family annihilators. According to Texas Public Radio, Texas now leads the country for family annihilation. Rocha was granted a year-long sabbatical courtesy of the University of Tennessee Humanities Center (now called Denbo Center) and a University of Tennessee Hodges Research and Travel Grant in support of this collection, as well as for accompanying field work that took her across Texas, where she captured film, photo, and audio to curate her own living archives. You can read poems from this new manuscript here, here, here, and here.

Keep Punching, Jimmy is her fourth book at its beginning stages. The title is taken from her husband’s tattoo, one in honor of his father. This manuscript is all about love, and it seeks to leave violence behind in favor of joy, celebration, and tribute.

The recipient of 2020 and 2024 CantoMundo fellowships and 2019 MacDowell fellowship, Rocha has had work featured in the Best New Poets anthology, as well as Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today, Oxford American, among others, with a feature in The New York Times. She serves as one of two Poetry Editors for Waxwing Literary Journal and has recently joined the editorial review board of Tupelo Press.

She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. At her short time at the University of Tennessee, she has advised and supervised nearly all the poetry MFA and PhD theses and dissertations, as well as provided support to numerous undergraduates and their respective creative writing organizations. Rocha was awarded a 2024 Outstanding Teaching Award by the UT Alumni Association and a 2024 Faculty Award in Teaching Innovation for her implementation of Felicia Rose Chavez’s Antiracist Writing Workshop. She is always available and eager for opportunities to read from her collections, to lead poetry workshops, or to present her research on domestic violence.

In Knoxville, she met her now-husband, Louis, and is growing into the role of a stepmom. Her three senior chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo remain the loves of her life, and her ultimate goal is to care for senior and hospice rescue chihuahuas. For more, see the Poetry Foundation.