Poet Biography

Ámbar Past

ÁMBAR PAST was born in the U.S. in 1949. She emigrated to Mexico at the age of 23 and became a Mexican citizen. She writes in Spanish and Tzotzil Mayan, and her works have been translated and published in English, Italian, Bosnian, French, Polish and Japanese. She has worked as a circus performer, a housewife, an amber carver, papermaker and a silk-screen printer—living among and working with Mayan women in Chiapas making the beautiful paper on which poems and graphic works are printed. In 2005, there appeared her Incantations, the first book of Mayan literature published in 500 years—a bilingual masterpiece of Mayan women’s poems and graphics she had collected and translated.