Vanessa Freije

Vanessa Freije is a writer who grew up near the US-Mexico border as an adolescent. She has since spent the last fifteen years researching and living in Mexico, and she earned a PhD in Latin American history in 2015. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, Atlas Obscura, and The Conversation, among other outlets. In 2020, she published an award-winning book on political scandals and media during the end of Mexico’s one-party rule (Duke University Press). Now, she is turning to literary fiction to expand the themes and depths of emotions she can examine in her writing. She is currently working on a novel of magical realism, which centers Nahua practices of weathermaking to ask what it would mean to be able to control the weather in the context of climate disaster and state attempts to erase Indigenous life. Vanessa currently lives in Burien, WA and teaches in International Studies at the University of Washington.