Dagoberto Gilb (born 1950 in Los Angeles), is an American writer who writes extensively about the American Southwest. [1]
He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees. Gilb embarked on a career in construction, became a journeyman carpenter, and joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners in Los Angeles.
Gilb was born to a mother from Mexico who came across the border illegally, while his father was born in Kentucky. Gilb's parents were raised in Los Angeles from a young age—his mother in downtown L.A., his father in Boyle Heights. Both spoke Spanish. The two divorced when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother. His father worked for 49 years in an industrial laundry, where he became the floor supervisor. His mother was a model in her early years, then became a dental assistant, until she remarried two more times.
Gilb began working at thirteen as a sheet shaker, then found jobs as a janitor and a factory shipping clerk. After high school, he went to several community colleges, working full-time as a paper cutter and as a stockboy in a major department store. He finally transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated in 1974 with a double major in Philosophy and Religious Studies, remaining there until he also received M.A. in Religious Studies in 1976.
From 1976-79 Gilb worked in many areas of the construction trades to make his living, as a laborer, stonemason, and carpenter. A new father, by 1979 he had joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, and he worked as a journeyman until 1992. Though he did all facets of carpentry work, his main employment was as class-A high-rise.
In 1977 while completing a never-published novel, Gilb was working on a three-story addition to the museum at the University of Texas at El Paso when he learned of the writer Raymond Carver, who was teaching across the campus street and was only at the beginning of his national acclaim. Because of Carver's prominence, Gilb turned to short stories, and he began publishing in 1982. The first bound work of his own was a chapbook-sized collection, Winners on the Pass Line (1985), also the first by El Paso's Cinco Puntos Press. His first full book of stories (35 had been published in magazines by then) was The Magic of Blood (1993), with the University of New Mexico Press. The stories are populated by working men, Mexican American, who live in the Southwest. It won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Jesse Jones Texas Institute of Letters Award, and was a PEN Faulkner finalist.
More books followed, all published in New York by Grove Press: a novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), about a drifter living at a financial border as a resident of a YMCA on the El Paso border; a collection of short fiction, Woodcuts of Women (2001), stories of men obsessed with women; a collection of nonfiction essays, Gritos (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, collecting Gilb's nonfiction essays as a construction worker, a writer, a teacher, and a parent; an anthology, Hecho en Tejas (2006), winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award, now the canonical work of record for Mexican American literature in Texas; and the novel The Flowers (2008), an urban survival tale of a Chicano becoming a man in a city on the verge of a white-and-black race riot. Before the End, After the Beginning (2011) is his latest collection of short fiction. As an after effect of a stroke Gilb suffered in 2009, the book is a meditation on the transitory, on impermanence, on "unseen" people, themes and characters Gilb has always dwelled on, now heightened.
In Gritos, the collection of mostly autobiographical essays, Gilb locates his work in American letters, and by doing so, claims space for Chicanos in American life and culture. Gilb labels his narrative approach “first-person stupid,” but critics praise its candor, depth, and clarity (despite or maybe because of the author's rejection of heavy-handed commentary). [2] The essays are parable-like: “fool stories” that express learned wisdom.
Gilb has also worked on a few movies and documentaries and spent several years writing commentaries which aired on the NPR show Fresh Air . In 1997, he accepted a job teaching in the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University. In September 2009, Gilb joined the faculty of the University of Houston–Victoria as a Writer-in-Residence and Executive Director of Centro Victoria: Center for Mexican American Literature and Culture. [3] [4] Gilb was terminated for cause by UHV in 2024 for refusing to teach courses assigned to him by the university. A suit he filed in federal court against UHV alleging breach of contract and workplace discrimination was dismissed. [5]
PatMora is an American poet and author of books for adults, teens and children. A native of El Paso, Texas, her grandparents came to the city from northern Mexico. She graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso, received Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, and was awarded American Library Association Honorary Membership. A literacy advocate, in 1996, she founded Children's Day, Book Day , now celebrated across the country each year on April 30.
Zyzzyva is a triannual magazine of writers and artists. It places an emphasis on showcasing emerging voices and never before published writers in addition to the already established. Based in San Francisco, it began publishing in 1985. ZYZZYVA's slogan is "The Last Word," referring to "zyzzyva", the last word in the American Heritage Dictionary. A zyzzyva is an American weevil. The accent is on the first syllable.
Andre Dubus III is an American novelist and short story writer. He is a member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Sergio Troncoso is an American author of short stories, essays and novels. He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, working-class immigrants, families and fatherhood, philosophy in literature, and crossing cultural, psychological, and philosophical borders.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher.
Rick Bass is an American writer and an environmental activist. He has a Bachelor of Science in Geology with a focus in Wildlife from Utah State University. Right after he graduated, he interned for one year as a Wildlife Biologist at the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company in Arkansas. He then went onto working as an oil and gas geologist and consultant before becoming a writer and teacher. He has worked across the United States at various universities: University of Texas at Austin, Beloit College, University of Montana, Pacific University, and most recently Iowa State University. He has done many workshops and lectures on writing and wildlife throughout his career. Texas Tech University and University of Texas at Austin have collections of his written work.
Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology, which gathers verse that spans from the 17th century to the present day. His memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2024 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is An Ordinary Life, and his poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review. His third poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe, winner of the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award, brought Fairchild's work to national prominence, garnering him a large number of awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, California Book Award, Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, National Book Award (finalist), Capricorn Poetry Award, and Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships. The book ultimately gave him international prominence, as The Waywiser Press in England published the U.K. edition of the book. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched...workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music."
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright grant in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
James Carlos Blake is an American writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His work has received extensive critical favor and several notable awards. He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” as well as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.” He is a recipient of the University of South Florida's Distinguished Humanities Alumnus Award and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
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American Short Fiction is a nationally circulated literary magazine founded in 1991 and based in Austin, Texas. Issued triannually, American Short Fiction publishes short fiction, novel excerpts, an occasional novella, and strives to publish work by both established and emerging contemporary authors. The magazine seeks out stories "that dive into the wreck, that stretch the reader between recognition and surprise, that conjure a particular world with delicate expertise—stories that take a different way home."
The Magic of Blood is a short story collection by Dagoberto Gilb. It received the 1994 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the 1993 Whiting Writers' Award. The collection was released to rave reviews by several reputable critics, as well as authors, for its brutal realism and genuine portrayal of the marginalized masses. His book contains 29 stories separated into three distinct sections, which epitomize the perspective of the working classes and Chicano culture. Gilb's prose is simplistic in nature and his writing belongs to a proletariat genre, which explores the existence of labor, love, families, friends and the immigrant community in America.
David Joseph Weber was an American historian whose research focused on the history of the Southwestern U.S. and its transition from Spanish and Mexican control to becoming part of the United States. For a period of time, this field of study had largely been ignored, as both United States and Latin American historians concentrated on the central stories in their fields. He "was among the first scholars to focus on the importance of the relationship between Mexico and the United States."
Cinco Puntos Press is an imprint of publishing company Lee & Low Books. It is a general trade publisher that has received attention for its bilingual children's books and fiction and non-fiction focusing on the Mexico–United States border region. It was founded by novelist Lee Merrill Byrd and poet Bobby Byrd in 1985 and sold to Lee & Low in June 2021. It is known for its multi-cultural and political focus for both children and adults.
From This Wicked Patch of Dust is a novel by Sergio Troncoso first published in 2011 by The University of Arizona Press. It explores the struggle of a Mexican-American family to become American and yet not be pulled apart by a maelstrom of cultural forces.
Sam Quinones is an American journalist, and author of four books of narrative nonfiction, from Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his reporting in Mexico and on Mexicans in the United States, and for his chronicling of the opioid crisis in America through his 2015 book Dreamland, followed by The Least of Us in 2021. He has been a reporter since 1987, and is now a freelance journalist. He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2014.
Xavier Garza is an author and illustrator of children's books and professor of art at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio.
Sarah Cortez is a Latina poet, teacher, editor, and essayist from Houston, Texas. She is also a law enforcement officer who first gained acclaim for her poetry collection, How to Undress a Cop.
Abelardo Barrientos Delgado, aka Lalo, was a Chicano writer, community organizer, and poet. His work was important in establishing the Chicano poetry movement.
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