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Jadine Pluecker is a queer/trans artist, translator, interpreter, and writer who works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Over the last twenty years, she has built a body of work that traverses the fields of poetry, essay, literary translation, visual art installation, performance, and language justice organizing. 

She has published three books of poetry: Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016), The Every Wild (Mouthfeel Press, 2024), and Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas (Editorial Ultramarina, 2024). Ford Over used documentary poetic strategies and language drawn from the multilingual chronicles of colonial agents who traveled through the land now known as the state of Texas. This focus on the lands and waters of her home region permeates much of her work, particularly her 12-year project The Unsettlements that began in 2018 and combines performance, installation, and publications, including the artist book The Unsettlements: Dad (Lawndale Art Center, 2019). Her most recent book Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas (Editorial Ultramarina, 2024) is an autofiction novel in poems in continual translation and transformation between Englishes and Spanishes.  

Her essays on politics and aesthetics have appeared in Southwest Contemporary, Bomb Magazine, artnet, and Open Space. Pluecker’s prolific art writing was recognized with an Andy Warhol | Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant in 2016.

In 2010, she co-founded the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire with Jen/Eleana Hofer, going on to do performance, installation, and collaborative writing at the intersections of literary experimentation and language justice. For a decade until 2020, Antena Aire published, performed, organized, advocated, translated, and exhibited installations with numerous groups and institutions, including Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, and the Hammer Museum. A retrospective collection of this work titled Between Language and Justice, is forthcoming in fall 2027 from Ugly Duckling Presse. It will include some of the collaborative’s already internationally-circulating writings, including A Manifesto on Ultratranslation and the manual How to Build Language Justice, as well as other unpublished work.

She has translated 18 books and chapbooks from the Spanish with a focus on cultural production from northern Mexico, queer/trans writing, and essays on politics, aesthetics, and radical organizing. Her translation of Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016) by Sara Uribe was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of Trash (Deep Vellum, 2023) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize; it also won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Translated Book and the PEN America Translation Prize, though this last award was never announced in public because she participated in the boycott of PEN in 2024, citing the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Recently, her work to translate leading political theorists has included A We Without a State (Rupture Press, 2025) by the Mixe/Ayuujk writer Yasnaya Elena A. Gil and In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Common Notions, 2024).

The ALTA49 Keynote is sponsored by The International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa.