Tuesday, May 2, 2023 (INTS 1128)

• Kimberly Garza

  Kimberly Garza (she/her) is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, Creative Nonfiction, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She holds degrees in English, Spanish, and creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas, where she earned a PhD in 2019. A native Texan—born in Galveston, raised in Uvalde—she is the daughter of a Filipina immigrant mother and a Mexican-American father from the Rio Grande Valley. She lives in San Antonio, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Last Karankawas is her first novel.

  Twitter: @kimrgarza

  IG: @kimrgarza

  FB: @kimgarza

  www.kimberlygarza.com

• Xochitl Gonzalez

  Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming. Named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR, Olga Dies Dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and The New York City Book Awards. Gonzalez is a 2021 M.F.A. graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her non-fiction work has been published in Elle Decor, Allure, Vogue, Real Simple, and The Cut. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic where her work has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and lives in her hometown of Brooklyn with her dog, Hectah Lavoe.

  IG: @xochitltheg

  www.xochitlgonzalez.com

• Dr. Jennifer R. Nájera

  Jennifer R. Nájera is Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.  Dr. Nájera’s research interests lie at the intersections of race, immigration, and education, and she is committed to producing work that is community-accountable.  She is the author of The Borderlands of Race:  Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town (University of Texas Press, 2015) and is currently working on a manuscript entitled, Undocumented Education: Intersections of Activism and Education Among Undocumented Students.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023 (INTS 1113)

• Gabriel Ibarra

  Gabriel Ibarra, winner of the Alta California Chapbook Prize for On Display, was born and raised in Fresno, CA. He earned an Honorable Mention for the 2011 Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize, awarded by the Academy of American Poets, judged by the late Phil Levine. His poetry has been published in The Packinghouse Review, and from 2014-2016, to honor his roots as a Puentista, he served as a Puente Program Mentor at Fresno City College. Currently, he teaches as a full time English Lecturer at Fresno State, and serves as the Campus Liaison for the Fresno State Creative Writing Alumni Chapter, whose goal is to connect multiple generations of Fresno writers.

• Juanita E. Mantz

  Juanita E. Mantz (“JEM”) is a deputy public defender, writer, performer, and podcaster. She graduated from UC Riverside in 1999 with an English Literature degree and from USC Law in 2002. JEM has 2 books, a memoir titled "Tales of an Inland Empire Girl" (Los Nietos Press, 2022) and a hybrid chapbook titled "Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender, or how I became a punk rock lawyer" (Bamboo Dart Press, 2021) which won a gold medal at the International Latino Book Awards for best first book, nonfiction English. Her stories have been published in literary journals, newspapers & anthologies. She is an alumni of VONA and Macondo and is VP on the board of the Inlandia Institute. She's presented at UCR Writers' Week, the UCR Punk Conference, Pasadena LitFest, AWP & Beyond Baroque. She taught the ASA 2020 Freedom Course on Combatting Mass Incarceration. JEM is in the low res MFA writing program at the University of New Orleans and was the 2022 writer in residence at Pasadena City College. On her "Life of JEM" video podcast, she does live interviews with writers.

• Susan Straight

  Susan Straight’s most recent novel Mecca, was published March 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and released in paperback March 2023. Mecca was a national bestseller, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize, and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction. She was born in Riverside, California in 1960, and still lives there with her family. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught since 1988.

Thursday, May 4, 2023 (INTS 1128)

• Manuel Muñoz

  Manuel Muñoz’s new collection of short stories, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press in 2022 to great acclaim, making him a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. The author of two previous collections of short stories, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and a novel, What You See in the Dark, Muñoz has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards and an appearance in Best American Short Stories. His frequently anthologized work has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, ZYZZYVA, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, Muñoz currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona

• Melissa Lozada-Oliva

  Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria. She holds her MFA from NYU and has been featured in Vogue, NPR, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar and BBC Mundo. She lives in NYC.

• Richard T. Rodríguez

  Richard T. Rodríguez is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and English at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes in Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, film and visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies, and holds additional interests in transnational cultural studies, popular music studies, and comparative ethnic studies. After receiving his BA in English from UC Berkeley and PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, he taught for several years at Cal State LA and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before joining the UC Riverside faculty in 2016. The author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2009), which won the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad (Duke University Press, 2022), he is currently completing Undocumented Desires: Fantasies of Latino Male Sexuality. With Martin F. Manalansan IV, Chantal Nadeau, and Siobhan B. Somerville, he coedited a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Queering the Middle: Race, Region and a Queer Midwest.” His work has appeared in the journals Social Text, Cultural Dynamics, Latino Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Biography, American Literary History, Profession, Palimpsest, Aztlán, and American Quarterly, and in various edited collections including The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, Latino/a Literature in the Classroom, Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, A Concise Companion to American Studies, and Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. The Moving Image Review Editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, he also serves or has served on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Latino Studies, and InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture. In addition, he currently serves on the PMLA Advisory Committee. The 2019 recipient of the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award, granted by the Minority Scholars' Committee of the American Studies Association, he is the co-principal investigator on a University of California MRPI grant titled "The Global Latinidades Project: Globalizing Latinx Studies for the Next Millennium." His show, "Dr. Ricky on the Radio," can be heard weekly on KUCR.

Tuesday, May 9, 2023 (INTS 1128 & 1113)

• Jaime Hernandez

  As a young aimless Latino punk rocker in Oxnard, California, Jaime Hernandez, along with his brothers Gilbert and Mario self published the first issue of LOVE AND ROCKETS in 1981. It was picked up by Fantagraphics Books in 1982 and he has been doing comics since. He has also done illustrations for album covers and magazines and has won numerous awards including being inducted into The Eisner Hall of Fame. He still lives in Southern California.

• Michael Jayme

  Michael Jayme is a native of El Monte, California. A graduate of UC Riverside's Creative Writing department, his early work was first collected in 1996 as Look Back and Laugh for the Chicano Chapbook Series, edited by Gary Soto. The following year he began publishing under the surname "Jaime-Becerra" and shortly thereafter, a limited-edition collection of prose poems, entitled The Estrellistas Off Peck Road, was released locally by Temporary Vandalism. He studied in the University of California, Irvine's Master of Fine Arts in Fiction program, completing work toward his degree in 2001. He is the author of the collection of inter-related short stories, entitled Every Night Is Ladies' Night published by HarperCollins and the novel This Time Tomorrow published by St. Martin's Press. Jayme is currently at work on new stories, as well as a novel about rural musicians in Mexico.