Ivón Gordon Vailakis is a native of Quito, Ecuador. Her latest poetry collection Manzanilla del insomnio(2002) was awarded in Ecuador the prestigious Jorge Carrera Andrade Award in Poety. Colibríes en el exilio ) (1997) was a finalist for Casa de las Américas Award, and the poems from her new manuscript-in-progress were finalist of Brazil's International Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Rattapalax,The Drunkenboat, Drexel Review, Frigate: Transverse Review of Books, , Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review and many others. She has published short stories, a memoir, translations of her own poetry and of Gabriela Mistral. She has published many articles on Jorge Carrera Andrade, Gabriela Mistral, Sandra Cisneros, Helena María Viramontes, Carmen Boullosa, and others in academic journals in Spain, Chile, Ecuador, and the U.S. She has two books in progress, one dealing with the critical work of Gabriela Mistral, and the other on the figure of La Llorona in Latina Writers. She was a recipient of Senior/Scholar Fellowship from the Fulbright to research on the Converse Jews in Ecuador which led to Manzanilla del insomnio. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine on Latin American Literature, with emphasis on Contemporary Latin American Poetry and Literary Theory, and teaches at Redlands University.