Mariela Griffor

Mariela Griffor is a Chilean-American poet, publisher, and translator born on October 29, 1961, in Concepción, Chile. She came of age during the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship that followed the 1973 military coup against President Salvador Allende, and as a university student she became active in the resistance movement Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria.

The 1985 killing of her partner, MIR militant Julio Santibáñez, by Pinochet's security forces forced her into exile. She lived in Sweden from 1985 to 1998, where she completed her education, married American physicist Robert Griffor, and began publishing poetry in Swedish literary journals.

In 1998 the family settled in Detroit, Michigan, where she has remained based. She has published the poetry collections Exiliana, House, The Psychiatrist, and Declassified, the last of which draws on declassified United States government documents related to the 1973 Chilean coup. Her work moves between Spanish and English and circles the questions of political violence, memory, and exile that her own life has embodied.

In 2007 she co-founded Marick Press, an independent literary publisher based in the Detroit area that has issued translations from Spanish, Swedish, French, Dutch, and Arabic alongside English-language poetry. She has served as the honorary consul of Chile in Michigan and has taught creative writing at colleges in the Detroit area. Her translations of Chilean poets including Nicanor Parra and Pablo Neruda have appeared in journals across the United States and Europe.

Mariela is a Spanish feminine name, a diminutive of María, ultimately from the Hebrew Miryam through the Latin Maria. She has used the feminine name throughout her life.