Oriette D'Angelo is a Venezuelan poet currently living in the United States. She is the author of two collections and two chapbooks. Her first collection, Cardiopatías, won a first book prize in Venezuela. The poems in Cardiopatías were written between the years 2011 and 2014-a time of great upheaval in Venezuela. At the time, D'Angelo was a law student while also writing poetry. When D'Angelo was 21 years old, through her poetry, she began to explore the body and the city as two overlapping topics. D'Angelo experienced firsthand the slow devastation of her country under the government of Hugo Chávez, who led the country to a condition of hunger, poverty, unemployment, and violence. Her poems, without naming names, D'Angelo likens these conditions to a heart disease that destabilizes everything. Cardiopatías explores how it is to live under a repressive government that dictates how people have to live, and it explores how the body attempts to survive under that repression. After working on the manuscript for two years, she sent the book to the Emerging Writers Prize granted by Monte Avila Editores, winning first place, which led to the publication of the book. Shortly after publication she left Venezuela and has not been able to return. D'Angelo emigrated to the US in 2015 to complete an MA in Digital Media at DePaul University, then completed an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. She is currently a PhD candidate in Spanish Literature at the University of Iowa.
