María Esquinca is a poet and journalist. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas. She’s currently a producer for The Bay podcast, a production of KQED. Prior to that, she was New York Women’s Foundation IGNITE Fellow with Latino USA, and a 2020 Report for America Corps Member at Radio Bilingue.
She is an MFA graduate from the University of Miami. In 2017, she graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication with a Master of Mass Communication.
She has focused her reporting on immigration, social justice, and issues that affect communities of color. She has interned at WLRN, The New York Times Student Journalism Institute and was a Dow Jones News Fund Business Reporting Intern at Crain’s Detroit Business.
She was an Ethics and Excellence fellow for the student-led, investigative program, News 21. During her time at News 21 she reported on water contamination in colonias along the border. She’s reported on minimum wage laws and investigated racial profiling by the police department in El Paso.
During her undergrad at the University of Texas at El Paso, she was a reporter and editor at the student newspaper, The Prospector. Her story about how Student Government Association managed their funds won a first place award for in-depth reporting from the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association. She also won a second place award for Best Breaking News from the College Media Association for her coverage of a protest for the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students that went disappearing in Mexico.
Her poetry has appeared in Waxwing, The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Scalawag, Acentos Review, and No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry. In 2018, she won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets judged by Victoria Change. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Adroit Journal and ANMLY.
María Esquinca 