José Ruiz Pergentino was born in Buena Vista, San Agustín Loxicha, Oaxaca, Mexico in 1981. He studied for a degree in Education at the Escuela Normal Intercultural de Oaxaca. He received a scholarship from FONCA in Indigenous Languages (2005). He is the author of And I knew what to answer (Libros del Rincón, SEP) in Zapotec and Spanish. He won the CASA prize (2011) for poetry in the Zapotec language with the book Flor de zarzamora; Ye'ntii. He was a fellow of the Ford Foundation 2011-2013, he studied a master's degree in Contemporary Hispanic American Literature at the Austral University of Chile, in Valdivia. He is the author of the book of stories Hormigas Rojas (Almadía, 2012) and the illustrated book of poems Language of Birds.