Part of my thesis for the Executive Master in Art Market Studies 2023-25 at the University of Zurich.

Ana María Caballero is a multidisciplinary artist, born in 1981 in Miami, raised in Colombia, and currently based in Madrid, Spain. She is a distinguished poet and author with her work exploring motherhood and the tension between biological processes and their cultural implications. Caballero has created waves for poetry in the NFT space not only with her works but also with the foundation of theVERSEverse to support other poets and the establishment of poetry as art. [1]

She graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a BA in Romance Studies. A bit later, at the start of the 2010s, blogging was her foray to the online world with her blog called The Drugstore Notebook. [2] From very early on, Caballero did not only publish poems and other types of texts but also tried to uplift other poets. She started organizing poetry contests in her blog, sometimes with interesting rules such as only accepting submissions of poems that have been rejected from publications at least three times. “A poetry contest for rejects” as she pointed out in a podcast. [3]

Caballero’s first success in the world of writing would come in 2014 with a collection of her Spanish poems submitted under the name Entre domingo y domingo winning Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and making her the first woman to win that specific award. [4] She will later proceed to publish this set of poems in her homonym book. [5]

A major motivation for Caballero was the cumbersome nature of traditional poetry publishing, which requires submitting work to publications, paying review fees, and waiting months for a response—often without any guarantee of acceptance. Moreover, most poems are rejected, and the readership of these publications remains limited. While digitizing her poems to make them more accessible online, Caballero discovered NFTs in 2021 and recognized the technology’s potential as an alternative publishing route for poets.

Her first poems to sell as NFTs are seven poems in August 2021 as part of the Etherpoems: Spoken Word collection, a sale which also included 20 other poets and 160 poems in total.

Three months later, in November 2021, Caballero co-founded theVERSEverse alongside Kalen Iwamoto and Sasha Stiles. theVERSEverse is the first digital gallery dedicated to poetry, with the core mission being to empower poets creatively and financially, promote poetry as art, and establish the future of literature on the blockchain. [6] As part of theVERSEverse's curatorial framework, acclaimed poets are onboarded into Web3 and paired with crypto native artists to create unique works of poetic art, while text-based artists already active in the NFT space are elevated through their conceptual approach. Finally, the craft and creativity of generative text is explored through their GenText series, which produces limited edition text blocks by combining the talents of artists, poets, and an AI-powered writing tool. [7]

Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poetry in numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one-word responses to her poems on sheets of paper. One audience member left an origami swan. Subsequently, she used them as input to generate digital origami paper structures with the use of AI, wanting to pay homage to paper by presenting it as the message in and of itself, not solely as a medium for messages. 100 resulting digital paper origamis formed the Paperwork collection that was released in November 2023.

artifacts is a collection of 100 digital coins that Caballero released in September 2023 in collaboration with Alex Estorick. This is another project where, similarly to Paperwork, Caballero expands her artistic practice beyond poetry. The digital coins display AI-generated images of alternative histories focused on motherhood, family, and domesticity, thereby posing the question: what might these kinds of images mean when minted onto currency? “A coin is never just a coin. It’s a token of cultural value” the artists utter in a short clip that presents the collection. The stories of the subjects are simple but their identities remain unknown. In this way artifacts contests history by displacing value from established, patriarchal power and situating it in everyday homes. The collection was sold out in under 24 hours for ~$16,000.

Almost a year later, in August 2024, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, organized Money Talks, an exhibition that explored the place of money in society, starting from Roman, Chinese and Islamic coins of ancient times all the way to cryptocurrency. The museum curators commissioned Caballero and Estorick to create a new version of artifacts for the Oxford Crown so that the museum would be introduced into NFTs and AI in art. The Oxford Crown NFT was included in the exhibition and became the first NFT collected by the museum. [8]

The Francisco Carolinum in Linz became the second museum to acquire a work from Caballero. In December 2024, the museum announced via X the acquisition of five editions from Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem. [9] Caballero had invited 50 people earlier in the year to annotate the same poem, capturing their experiences through handwritten marginalia, and expanding poetry in the realm of participatory art.

The epitome of Caballero’s success is the Sotheby’s auction of Cord in January 2024 for $11,430 [10] which will make Caballero the first living poet to ever sell a poem at Sotheby’s and Cord the first digital poem to be sold at Sotheby’s. Cord is about the ties that bind, both visible like umbilical cords and invisible like family relationships. When Caballero was asked to provide a poem as part of the Sotheby’s auction, she immediately thought of using Cord as minting it on the blockchain would also be a play on how relationships form both visible and invisible ties in the digital art space too.

Caballero's growing presence in the art world was further reinforced in 2024 when her project Being Borges, a series of AI-generated photographs examining language biases in large datasets, was exhibited at Paris Photo, [11] while she performed Paperwork for a Digital Dialogues talks program at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Beyond the use of technology, Caballero uses her own body to perform while reciting her poems like in Waiting Room (2024). A strong influence for the artist to explore performative poems has been the crowd’s reaction to her public poem recitals. Hence she performs her verses on screen, using her own body to speak the language of the poem, exploring how the physical body ties to the verse. Waiting Room was sold in June 2024 to a private collector for $10,000. [12]

In Echo Graph, her first solo show at Office Impart in Berlin, Caballero continues to expand her artistic practice by exploring language through various mediums, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, and performance. The exhibition presents a single poem in multiple forms, examining how the medium through which verse is experienced shapes its meaning. Echo Graph ran from February 20 to April 4, 2025. [13]

In parallel to her journey in the NFT market, Caballero’s manuscripts are starting to garner more attention from the writing world. Her first nonfiction manuscript, A Petit Mal, was awarded the International Beverly Prize and was a finalist to myriads of other contests, eventually published in 2023. Mammal, her most recent manuscript, was awarded the 2022 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and was published in 2024, making it Caballero’s 7th book.

Based on Caballero's artistic practice, we can see that NFTs have opened significant new possibilities for poetry and text-based art that traditional publishing could not provide. Her journey demonstrates how blockchain technology has transformed poetry from a medium historically constrained by limited publishing opportunities and readership into collectible digital art with tangible value. By minting poems as NFTs, Caballero not only found an alternative route to publication that bypassed traditional gatekeepers and their cumbersome processes, but also elevated poetry to visual art status, allowing it to enter prestigious spaces like Sotheby's auctions and museum collections. Her work with theVERSEverse further illustrates how NFTs can build supportive ecosystems for undervalued art forms. Perhaps most significantly, Caballero's practice reveals how NFTs have enabled the expansion of poetry beyond text into multimedia, collaborative, and performative expressions—incorporating AI, performance, and audience participation—creating novel art forms that challenge traditional boundaries between literary and visual arts while establishing new economic models for creators working with intangible mediums.

[1] “Mission - theVERSEverse,” May 24, 2022, https://theverseverse.com/mission.

[2] thedrugstorenotebook, “The Drugstore Notebook,” Tumblr, Portable poetry and books on display., accessed April 1, 2024, https://thedrugstorenotebook.tumblr.com/.

[3] Kaloh, “From Ink to Blockchain Poetry Ft Ana Maria Caballero,” March 21, 2024, https://www.kaloh.xyz/p/ink-to-blockchain-poetry-ana-maria-caballero.

[4] “Premio Nacional de Poesía,” Instituto de Cultura El Carmen de Viboral, accessed April 1, 2024, https://culturaelcarmen.gov.co/eventos/premio-nacional-de-poesia/.

[5] “Entre Domingo y Domingo,” Ana Maria Caballero, accessed April 25, 2025, https://anamariacaballero.com/entre-domingo-y-domingo-2/.

[6] “Mission - theVERSEverse,” May 24, 2022, https://theverseverse.com/mission.

[7] “Framework - theVERSEverse,” May 27, 2022, https://theverseverse.com/framework.

[8] “A NEW OXFORD CROWN FOR THE AGE OF AI & NFTs,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://www.ashmolean.org/article/a-new-oxford-crown-for-the-age-of-nfts-and-ai.

[9] OÖ Kultur [@ooeculture], “💥 Excited to Announce That the Final Five Digital Editions of @CaballeroAnaMa ’s ‘Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem’ Are Joining Our Collection. 📝 The Series Invites Fifty People to Annotate the Same Poem, Capturing Their Experiences through Handwritten Marginalia. 🧵 Https://T.Co/sJtAxWHk4G,” Tweet, Twitter, December 30, 2024, https://x.com/ooeculture/status/1873709739223449888.

[10] “CORD | Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale | Contemporary NFT,” Sotheby’s, accessed April 1, 2024, https://www.sothebys.com/buy/cc1a07f8-f41b-4cc3-9d7a-e32360d2a356/lots/c99cc23c-dc24-4bb7-a6fe-a5b5da8f27b7.

[11] “Being Borges,” Ana Maria Caballero, accessed March 20, 2025, https://anamariacaballero.com/being-borges-2/.

[12] “Waiting Room,” Verisart, accessed March 20, 2025, https://verisart.com/works/ana-maria-caballero-c0899ad1-f28c-4319-b471-8783ffa9e4d7.

[13] “Ana María Caballero – Echo Graph / Exhibitions / Exhibitions / OFFICE IMPART,” OFFICE IMPART, accessed March 31, 2025, https://officeimpart.com/ana-maria-caballero-echo-graph.

Part of my thesis for the Executive Master in Art Market Studies 2023-25 at the University of Zurich.

Ana María Caballero is a multidisciplinary artist, born in 1981 in Miami, raised in Colombia, and currently based in Madrid, Spain. She is a distinguished poet and author with her work exploring motherhood and the tension between biological processes and their cultural implications. Caballero has created waves for poetry in the NFT space not only with her works but also with the foundation of theVERSEverse to support other poets and the establishment of poetry as art. [1]

She graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a BA in Romance Studies. A bit later, at the start of the 2010s, blogging was her foray to the online world with her blog called The Drugstore Notebook. [2] From very early on, Caballero did not only publish poems and other types of texts but also tried to uplift other poets. She started organizing poetry contests in her blog, sometimes with interesting rules such as only accepting submissions of poems that have been rejected from publications at least three times. “A poetry contest for rejects” as she pointed out in a podcast. [3]

Caballero’s first success in the world of writing would come in 2014 with a collection of her Spanish poems submitted under the name Entre domingo y domingo winning Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and making her the first woman to win that specific award. [4] She will later proceed to publish this set of poems in her homonym book. [5]

A major motivation for Caballero was the cumbersome nature of traditional poetry publishing, which requires submitting work to publications, paying review fees, and waiting months for a response—often without any guarantee of acceptance. Moreover, most poems are rejected, and the readership of these publications remains limited. While digitizing her poems to make them more accessible online, Caballero discovered NFTs in 2021 and recognized the technology’s potential as an alternative publishing route for poets.

Her first poems to sell as NFTs are seven poems in August 2021 as part of the Etherpoems: Spoken Word collection, a sale which also included 20 other poets and 160 poems in total.

Three months later, in November 2021, Caballero co-founded theVERSEverse alongside Kalen Iwamoto and Sasha Stiles. theVERSEverse is the first digital gallery dedicated to poetry, with the core mission being to empower poets creatively and financially, promote poetry as art, and establish the future of literature on the blockchain. [6] As part of theVERSEverse's curatorial framework, acclaimed poets are onboarded into Web3 and paired with crypto native artists to create unique works of poetic art, while text-based artists already active in the NFT space are elevated through their conceptual approach. Finally, the craft and creativity of generative text is explored through their GenText series, which produces limited edition text blocks by combining the talents of artists, poets, and an AI-powered writing tool. [7]

Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poetry in numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one-word responses to her poems on sheets of paper. One audience member left an origami swan. Subsequently, she used them as input to generate digital origami paper structures with the use of AI, wanting to pay homage to paper by presenting it as the message in and of itself, not solely as a medium for messages. 100 resulting digital paper origamis formed the Paperwork collection that was released in November 2023.

artifacts is a collection of 100 digital coins that Caballero released in September 2023 in collaboration with Alex Estorick. This is another project where, similarly to Paperwork, Caballero expands her artistic practice beyond poetry. The digital coins display AI-generated images of alternative histories focused on motherhood, family, and domesticity, thereby posing the question: what might these kinds of images mean when minted onto currency? “A coin is never just a coin. It’s a token of cultural value” the artists utter in a short clip that presents the collection. The stories of the subjects are simple but their identities remain unknown. In this way artifacts contests history by displacing value from established, patriarchal power and situating it in everyday homes. The collection was sold out in under 24 hours for ~$16,000.

Almost a year later, in August 2024, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, organized Money Talks, an exhibition that explored the place of money in society, starting from Roman, Chinese and Islamic coins of ancient times all the way to cryptocurrency. The museum curators commissioned Caballero and Estorick to create a new version of artifacts for the Oxford Crown so that the museum would be introduced into NFTs and AI in art. The Oxford Crown NFT was included in the exhibition and became the first NFT collected by the museum. [8]

The Francisco Carolinum in Linz became the second museum to acquire a work from Caballero. In December 2024, the museum announced via X the acquisition of five editions from Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem. [9] Caballero had invited 50 people earlier in the year to annotate the same poem, capturing their experiences through handwritten marginalia, and expanding poetry in the realm of participatory art.

The epitome of Caballero’s success is the Sotheby’s auction of Cord in January 2024 for $11,430 [10] which will make Caballero the first living poet to ever sell a poem at Sotheby’s and Cord the first digital poem to be sold at Sotheby’s. Cord is about the ties that bind, both visible like umbilical cords and invisible like family relationships. When Caballero was asked to provide a poem as part of the Sotheby’s auction, she immediately thought of using Cord as minting it on the blockchain would also be a play on how relationships form both visible and invisible ties in the digital art space too.

Caballero's growing presence in the art world was further reinforced in 2024 when her project Being Borges, a series of AI-generated photographs examining language biases in large datasets, was exhibited at Paris Photo, [11] while she performed Paperwork for a Digital Dialogues talks program at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Beyond the use of technology, Caballero uses her own body to perform while reciting her poems like in Waiting Room (2024). A strong influence for the artist to explore performative poems has been the crowd’s reaction to her public poem recitals. Hence she performs her verses on screen, using her own body to speak the language of the poem, exploring how the physical body ties to the verse. Waiting Room was sold in June 2024 to a private collector for $10,000. [12]

In Echo Graph, her first solo show at Office Impart in Berlin, Caballero continues to expand her artistic practice by exploring language through various mediums, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, and performance. The exhibition presents a single poem in multiple forms, examining how the medium through which verse is experienced shapes its meaning. Echo Graph ran from February 20 to April 4, 2025. [13]

In parallel to her journey in the NFT market, Caballero’s manuscripts are starting to garner more attention from the writing world. Her first nonfiction manuscript, A Petit Mal, was awarded the International Beverly Prize and was a finalist to myriads of other contests, eventually published in 2023. Mammal, her most recent manuscript, was awarded the 2022 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and was published in 2024, making it Caballero’s 7th book.

Based on Caballero's artistic practice, we can see that NFTs have opened significant new possibilities for poetry and text-based art that traditional publishing could not provide. Her journey demonstrates how blockchain technology has transformed poetry from a medium historically constrained by limited publishing opportunities and readership into collectible digital art with tangible value. By minting poems as NFTs, Caballero not only found an alternative route to publication that bypassed traditional gatekeepers and their cumbersome processes, but also elevated poetry to visual art status, allowing it to enter prestigious spaces like Sotheby's auctions and museum collections. Her work with theVERSEverse further illustrates how NFTs can build supportive ecosystems for undervalued art forms. Perhaps most significantly, Caballero's practice reveals how NFTs have enabled the expansion of poetry beyond text into multimedia, collaborative, and performative expressions—incorporating AI, performance, and audience participation—creating novel art forms that challenge traditional boundaries between literary and visual arts while establishing new economic models for creators working with intangible mediums.

[1] “Mission - theVERSEverse,” May 24, 2022, https://theverseverse.com/mission.

[2] thedrugstorenotebook, “The Drugstore Notebook,” Tumblr, Portable poetry and books on display., accessed April 1, 2024, https://thedrugstorenotebook.tumblr.com/.

[3] Kaloh, “From Ink to Blockchain Poetry Ft Ana Maria Caballero,” March 21, 2024, https://www.kaloh.xyz/p/ink-to-blockchain-poetry-ana-maria-caballero.

[4] “Premio Nacional de Poesía,” Instituto de Cultura El Carmen de Viboral, accessed April 1, 2024, https://culturaelcarmen.gov.co/eventos/premio-nacional-de-poesia/.

[5] “Entre Domingo y Domingo,” Ana Maria Caballero, accessed April 25, 2025, https://anamariacaballero.com/entre-domingo-y-domingo-2/.

[6] “Mission - theVERSEverse,” May 24, 2022, https://theverseverse.com/mission.

[7] “Framework - theVERSEverse,” May 27, 2022, https://theverseverse.com/framework.

[8] “A NEW OXFORD CROWN FOR THE AGE OF AI & NFTs,” accessed March 20, 2025, https://www.ashmolean.org/article/a-new-oxford-crown-for-the-age-of-nfts-and-ai.

[9] OÖ Kultur [@ooeculture], “💥 Excited to Announce That the Final Five Digital Editions of @CaballeroAnaMa ’s ‘Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem’ Are Joining Our Collection. 📝 The Series Invites Fifty People to Annotate the Same Poem, Capturing Their Experiences through Handwritten Marginalia. 🧵 Https://T.Co/sJtAxWHk4G,” Tweet, Twitter, December 30, 2024, https://x.com/ooeculture/status/1873709739223449888.

[10] “CORD | Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale | Contemporary NFT,” Sotheby’s, accessed April 1, 2024, https://www.sothebys.com/buy/cc1a07f8-f41b-4cc3-9d7a-e32360d2a356/lots/c99cc23c-dc24-4bb7-a6fe-a5b5da8f27b7.

[11] “Being Borges,” Ana Maria Caballero, accessed March 20, 2025, https://anamariacaballero.com/being-borges-2/.

[12] “Waiting Room,” Verisart, accessed March 20, 2025, https://verisart.com/works/ana-maria-caballero-c0899ad1-f28c-4319-b471-8783ffa9e4d7.

[13] “Ana María Caballero – Echo Graph / Exhibitions / Exhibitions / OFFICE IMPART,” OFFICE IMPART, accessed March 31, 2025, https://officeimpart.com/ana-maria-caballero-echo-graph.