Gina Valdés was born in Los Angeles in the segregated California Hospital during WWII. At the age of one, she experienced her first migration, north to south, and at nine, her second migration, south to north, growing up bilingual and bicultural on both sides of the United States-Mexico border. Her older sister Martha introduced her to poetry at the age of six, their grandmother's books of Mexican poets, among them, Sor Juana, Juan de Dios Peza, and Amado Nervo. The poetry spellbound her and the enchantment never left. Since then until now she has been reading and writing poetry. She was the recipient of a full Regents' Scholarship and received a B.A. degree in Creative Writing and an M.A. degree in Spanish Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Besides teaching beginning ESL and every level of Spanish, she taught Literature and Writing for twenty-five years, at UCSD, UCDavis, UCLA, SDSU. The University of Washington, and Colorado College.This year, 2025, Valdés marks fifty years publishing fiction and poetry. She published her first poems in the NewAge Journal in 1975, and has continued to publish her work in journals, anthologies, and textbooks in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, in five languages, in ten countries. She has published two bilingual poetry chapbooks, Comiendo lumbre/Eating Fire and Puentes y fronteras/Bridges and Borders, a novel, There Are No Madmen Here, and an award-winning poetry collection, Border Duende, was published this year, 2025, by FlowerSong Press. She resides in San Diego near family in the midst of diverse and abundant fauna and flora.