Poet, translator, essayist, and educator, Sérgio Luiz Rodrigues Medeiros was born in 1959 in Bela Vista, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Raised in a region where Brazil borders Paraguay, Medeiros was exposed from an early age to Portuguese, Spanish, and Indigenous languages (especially Guarani). In 1995, he defended his doctoral thesis on the mythology of the Jê linguistic group, and has since translated many works of Amerindian mythopoetic traditions. He currently resides in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina.

Through his poetry and translation, Medeiros has disseminated elements of Amerindian culture, such as its mythopoetics and its differential relations with the natural world. He also combines experimental poetics and indigenous traditions to complicate the notion of human by ascribing human qualities to entities such as plants, animals and atmospheric conditions. Going beyond a mere identification of the poetic voice with nature, Medeiros develops an entire poetics based on indigenous notions that unsettle the definition of the human. In an attempt to resignify the borders between human and nonhuman, moving away from the Western paradigm, he transforms beings into things and things into beings, showing the shared coexistence between all elements of the Universe. Although Medeiros does not refer directly to environmental issues or to indigenous rights, his poetry can be read as anti-anthropocentric and as advocating for the decolonization of the poetry. 

Some of his texts also innovatively engage the aesthetics of nonsense to produce arresting images of the subjectivity of plants. At the beginning of O sexo vegetal, Medeiros quotes reflections by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to the effect that if we are to truly know nature, it is not enough to project our own designs and desires onto it, but we must, imaginatively, attempt to assume its point of view, a notion he terms “perspectivism.” What is crucial about this notion is that it is not a permanent inversion of the dichotomy human/animal, but rather a temporary or deictic positionality, in which animals, which are the prey of humans, can see themselves as predators of other animals or even of humans themselves. Personhood, therefore, only acquires meaning in the act of being asserted, a concept that highlights the positionality and fluctuating nature of being(s). 

In Tótens, a 2012 volume gathering two works (Enrique Flor and Os Eletoesqus), Medeiros once more emphasizes the idea of shifting perspectives. Enrique Flor is the story of a character from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Portuguese musician Enrique Flor (or Henry Flower), who plays his irresistible “wild organ” at weddings, before he journeys to Brazil and encounters there the exuberance of the tropical vegetation. A continuation of the theme of O sexo vegetal, this amusing nonsense tale also reminds us of our original kinship with the world of plants, since Flower is bent on marrying people whose last names also refer to elements of the natural world. The second book, Os Eletoesqus, depicts the existence of totemic legendary figures which embody the fluid identity of the human/animal ancestor spirits.

Some of his poetry books include: Alongamento (2004), O sexo vegetal (2009), O choro da aranha etc. (2013), A idolatria poética ou a febre de imagens (2017).