Pura López-Colomé was born in Mexico City in 1952, spent part of her childhood in Mérida, Yucatan, and attended high school in the US. She studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, publishing literary criticism, poems, and translations in a regular column for the newspaper Unomásuno. English translations of her work include No Shelter: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Aurora (Shearsman Books, 2008), and Watchword (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).