Nopality November Artist Spotlight | Sasha Roque Pimentel
Written by Kimberly Saenz | Nov. 30, 2025 | El Paso, TX
Photos by Julio Barreras
Sasha Roque Pimentel is a Filipina poet and educator in El Paso, Texas — a city known for sharing a border with Ciudad Juárez, México. Born in Manila, Philippines and raised in Saudi Arabia and the United States, Roque Pimentel is familiar with the physical and imaginary limitations of borders separating two places, but prefers to view borders through the lens of poetics in that borders or margins are meeting points; rather, “a border is not a boundary, it is where something edges into another space.”
To summarize Roque Pimentel’s accolades, she is an Associate Professor of poetry and creative nonfiction in the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso, which required that she learn to read, write, and speak in Spanish. She received the Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award for her work at UT El Paso in 2015. She is the author of two poetry books, the most recent of which, “For Want of Water*”* (Beacon Press, 2017), won the National Poetry Series, the Helen C. Smith Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. She previously published her first poetry book, “Inside She Swallows” (West End Press, 2010) **and published several individual poems and essays with established literary publications. Additionally, she acted as a guest editor for the Academy of American Poets.
On being multilingual, she likens her first language, Tagalog, to the Spanish language. Although Tagalog, English, and Spanish are all in her repertoire, she highlights the similarities between Tagalog and Spanish as a result of Spanish colonization. Because many of her students traveled from Mexico or South America, she teaches in Spanish more often than she uses her home language, but this splitting of the tongue and separation from the homeland is a common ground amongst her and her students.
In following the work, as many must do, she unearthed a sense of home and belonging in this Texas border city which linked her to the Philippines; “I code-switch, able to cross into the experiences of others.” This dislocation and duality shared between Roque Pimentel and her students is not atypical, given that El Paso is a border city and has a military base, the residents find comfort in the community’s lived experiences. Despite the very present and looming border wall, Roque Pimentel recognizes that the boundary is imaginary, that much like poetry, we exist and thrive between the boundaries of places, language, and the written word.
Being a person of diaspora, she explains that her perception of identity, the thread which ties her to the Philippines spans an entire ocean, metaphorically as much as literally, “The reality is, I am both connected to and severed from my origins. It is hard to be a writer of diaspora. You are both compelled to and exiled from a sense of being.” She considers that the geography and the culture of her homeland is not what calls her attention, but the nuances of dual identity and diaspora are ideas which she interrogates through writing.
On the basement floor of the Education Building at UT El Paso, past wood-paneled vending machines that only take cash, Roque Pimentel’s black stilettos click towards the classroom. From her bag, she removes Uni-ball Vision micro pens and pocket notebooks for each of her creative writing students. The blue ink of the pen, like the memory of this unexpected gift, is smooth and permanent across the page of each student, as she distinguishes the pen as her preferred writing tool. Acts of generosity are not unusual for those who have crossed paths with Roque Pimentel; she credits these acts to cultural and familial tradition. With a tender smile, she shares a memory of her grandfather gifting her a basket of mangoes. To her, gift-giving is not about the material object, but about knowing, hearing, and seeing the person(s).
In conversation on becoming a poet, she retraces the timeline of her life, beginning in her youth, when she spent her time reading Shakespeare and distant mythologies, loving the narrative and escapism which came from reading. As a young adult, she became an avid rock climber, a passion to such a degree that she left school to pursue the edges of the earth. She parallels rock climbing to poetry, both a challenge of being on the precipice of, of edging something extraordinary and unbounded. After persistence from Leon Stokesbury, a professor of hers at the time, Roque Pimentel returned to university to “speak into the space on the page,” to pursue the edges of the poetic word. As she discovered her ability to tread the mountainous terrain and elevated breath of a poem through language, syntax, and musicality, there was little which she would give up for the act of writing.
While Roque Pimentel wrote freely for some time with the flexibility allotted to her and her husband through their academic professions, motherhood metamorphosed her lifestyle and her writing. Currently a mother to a young toddler, Roque Pimentel balances her university presence, her own research and writing projects, and quality time with her husband and son. With an innate selflessness and adoration, she describes how her son is all-encompassing, is at an age of absorption and discovery of every sense, but this does not stop Roque Pimentel from finding dedicated time to her writing projects. She appreciates that her son has expanded her own poetic senses and perceptivity in the way he interprets, forms, and communicates words. This stage of curiosity and fluidity informs her poetics and her exploration of language.
At a poetry reading in the darkened room below the UT El Paso library, a spotlight forms a halo around Roque Pimentel’s figure as she opens with her poem, “In Every Immigrant Home That Tin of Royal Dansk Butter Cookies, Blue as Old Water, Without Cookies, Filled for Sewing with Buttons and Notions*,”* for which she received The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. Her inflection stills the room, silent with the exception of an innocent babbling of recognition from her son, as if her voice sings a familiar lullaby to him. She follows with her poem “Cats,” which juxtaposes the violence of the diaspora with the deadly fate of stray cats. With her continued efforts to examine the socio-political landscapes that shape our lives, and knowledge of her earlier work, her future projects are sure to lend themselves to the personal, as well as our human responsibility to bare witness to, record, and demand change.
Presently, some of her favorite poems include: “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay, “Practice Standing Unleashed and Clean” by Patricia Smith, and “Wade in the Water” by Tracy K. Smith.
If looking to discover more Texas-based Asian or Asian American authors, she suggests Luisa Aguilar Igloria, Yi Wei, and Chen Chen.
Photo by Marie Braswell | Graphics by Gwen Gravador
Follow the Artist:
Website: Sasha Pimentel
