María Esquinca is a poet and journalist. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas. She was a 2020 Report for America Corps Member at Radio Bilingue. She is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Miami. Prior to that, 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’s been a fellow with the Solutions Journalism Network, and News 21. During her time at News 21 she reported on water contamination in colonias along the border. Prior to that, she was an investigative reporter with Chucopedia and reported on minimum wage laws in El Paso. She also 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 managing 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.
