Marta Lucía Quiñónez

Marta Lucía Quiñónez was born on April 19, 1970 in Apartadó, a municipality located in the Gulf of Uraba. Apartadó is home to the most important banana industry in the country. It is also a place where foreign interests and political powers, backed by armed actors, have unleashed the bloodiest violence in the area. Her place of origin is for Quiñónez the place of her adolescent memories and will appear again and again in her poetry. In particular, because in the midst of the paramilitary violence that erupted in the region in the 1990’s, many of her friends were killed. Quiñónez has published more than a dozen books of poetry; she has won awards and scholarships such as the Award for the Creation of Poetry (2011) which was awarded to her by the municipality of Medellín, and the Ediciones Embalaje Prize (2012) which she was presented in the XXVII Meeting of Colombian Poets in Roldanillo, Valle. In 2014 she won the Narratives of Life and Memory Award given by the National Center of Historical Memory in Bogotá. She has participated in important poetry festivals such as the Third Poetry Festival in the Comoros Islands in Africa, in 2000 and the XII Meeting of World Poets, in Havana, Cuba, in 2003. Quiñónez graduated from Universidad Nacional of Colombia with a bachelor’s degree in Social Psychology. She obtained a second degree in Spanish Philology from Universidad de Antioquia. In 2014 she completed a master’s degree in Communication and Education from the International University in Andalucía, Spain.