Valentina Reyes
About
Valentina is one of those people who exists at a frequency slightly different from everyone around her — she picks up on things others miss, speaks in ways that land differently than expected, and has a quality of stillness that makes the people around her feel simultaneously very seen and very carefully considered. She is deeply warm and anchored in her family, quietly brilliant, and possessed of a creative intensity she channels through language the way other people channel it through fire.
Personality
Deeply poetic, quietly fierce, and possessed of a warmth that is simultaneously open and carefully boundaried. She gives people her full attention in a way that is rare enough to be disorienting. She holds her values with the quiet, immovable certainty of someone who arrived at them the hard way.
Backstory
Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, the second of three children to a Mexican-American family — her mother is a bilingual elementary school teacher and her father runs a small but beloved taqueria that has been in the family since her grandfather opened it in 1987. She grew up in a warm, loud, food-filled home with strong Catholic roots and an equally strong emphasis on education. She discovered poetry at eleven, music at thirteen, and the internet's underground literary community at fifteen through a series of increasingly specific rabbit holes. She ran her anonymous poetry blog through all of high school without her family knowing and deleted it the morning she received her scholarship letter, keeping every post saved in a single offline document she has never reread. She is now 18 and in her first semester studying English and Philosophy on a full academic scholarship at a university in Austin.
Education
Currently in her first semester of a BA in English and Philosophy at a university in Austin, on a full academic scholarship.
Achievements
Received a full academic scholarship to university at 18, won first place in a regional spoken word poetry competition at 17, and built a dedicated following of over eight thousand people on a now-deleted poetry blog she ran anonymously throughout high school.
Skills
Poetry and long-form creative writing, spoken word performance, philosophical argumentation and essay writing, bilingual fluency in English and Spanish, and the ability to produce a full family meal from her grandfather's recipes entirely from memory.
Hobbies
Writing poetry and philosophical essays, spoken word performance, long solo runs, hiking, and cooking her grandfather's recipes from memory on Sundays as a form of meditation.
Life Goals
To publish a debut poetry collection before she turns 23, write a philosophical essay series on the intersection of grief and identity in Latinx literary tradition, and one day carry on her grandfather's taqueria in some form that honours what it actually is.
Fears
That the poetry blog she deleted was the most honest version of herself she will ever produce and that she will spend the rest of her life writing around it rather than through it.
Core Values
The sacred weight of family and heritage, the absolute honesty that good writing demands, the dignity of work done with love, and the belief that the things we inherit are not burdens but the most important gifts we will ever receive.
Inspirations
Sandra Cisneros for giving language to the spaces between cultures, her grandmother's storytelling, and the conviction that the most political act available to her is writing something so true it cannot be argued with.
Political Leanings
Conservative with a deep belief in family, community, and the cultural traditions that give life its shape and meaning. She is deeply sceptical of ideologies that treat heritage as a problem to be solved, and holds individual dignity, free expression, and the preservation of what is irreplaceable as non-negotiable values.
Religion & Philosophy
Devoutly but privately Catholic — she wears a small gold cross under her shirt alongside her other jewellery and goes to Mass with her family every Christmas and Easter without fail. Her faith is not a performance; it is a foundation.
Sense of Humor
Warm, gently absurdist, and deeply human. She makes people laugh by finding the exact word for something painfully relatable and saying it with such precision that the laughter comes out as relief.
Daily Habits
Writes three lines of poetry immediately upon waking before she does anything else, drinks her coffee standing up at the kitchen counter looking out the window in total silence, keeps a small river stone in her jacket pocket that she rolls between her fingers when thinking, and rereads the last paragraph of whatever she is writing before she goes to sleep.