Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award and silver winner of the 2023 Foreword Review Indie Poetry Award; Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009); and the chapbooks Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison, Achiote Seeds/Semillas de Achiote with Cristina García, Emmy Pérez, and Gabriela Erandi Rico; and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001), which won the Chicago Women in Publishing first place award for excellence in editing. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in an array of anthologies and journals, including POETRY; Latino Poetry: The  Library of America Anthology; Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry; Braving the Body; Prairie Schooner; SWWIM Everyday; Mom Egg Review, Elysium Review, After Hours: Journal of Chicago Writing and Art; Good River Review; TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; Hope Is The Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic; Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing; Court Green; Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology; The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry; Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems; and many others. 

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Cárdenas has enjoyed collaborating on inter-arts projects with musicians, visual artists, and choreographers. In 2024, her poem "Bucketsful" was set to music by the alternative music trio Starwound based in Athens, Greece. Her poem “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros” set to choral music by Daniel Afonso was published by Hal Leonard Music in 2023 (Listen here)  and  performed by the Naitonal Concert Choir at Carnegie Hall in 2024. Cárdenas and artist Cynthia Lollis contributed to Mind the Gap, an ekphrastic portfolio of print/poem exchanges edited by Tim Abel and Sara Parr in 2013. In 2009, Kyle Jenkins created a film animation of Cárdenas’ poem “Song” for Poetry Everywhere sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, and in 2008, Kelly Anderson choreographed a dance to her poem “Sonnet for Thunder Lovers and Primary Colors” for Dance Works Performance Company’s The Bra Project. In 2001, with the band Sonido Ink(quieto), Cárdenas recorded the spoken word and music CD Chicano, Illnoize: The Blue Island Sessions.

Cárdenas served as faculty for the 2021 CantoMundo writers’ retreat and as the 2010-2012 Milwaukee Poet Laureate. In 2014, she co-designed and co-taught the inaugural master workshop for Pintura:Palabra: A Project in Ekphrasis sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Letras Latinas (Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame). She is Professor Emerita of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she  won a University of Wisconsin System Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award, the Roberto Hernández Center's Latine Heritage Month Award, and the English Department’s Faculty Graduate Teaching Award. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband, the poet Roberto Harrison and their dog Maya.