Gabriela Valencia is a poet and essayist.

Her work appears or is forthcoming in Image Journal, Four Way Review, Waxwing, ANMLY, The Los Angeles Review, SAND Journal, Consequence Forum, Great Lakes Review, Watershed Review, and Volume among others. Her writing has received generous support in the form of a Tin House Workshop and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Germany, Denmark, and the American West. She has twice been named a finalist for the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Nonfiction in 2025 and 2024 and has also been named finalist for the 2023 CRAFT Hybrid Writing Contest and the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

A proud daughter of mestizo Mexican immigrants to the Chicagoland area, her literary interests include diaspora in the American Midwest; ecopoetics and folklore; speech, semiotics, and (mis)translation; anticipatory grief; and the ordinary divine. She received her MFA in Poetry from Boston University in 2022, where she served as Teaching Fellow.

She currently lives in Nebraska with her husband Josh and their two herding dogs, Rainer and Zola, where she works as a Teaching Artist for Nebraska Writers Collective and screens for various prizes, including the Alice James Award, the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, and the Kate Sommer Memorial Poetry Prize. She is at work on her first book.