I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and raised in Fremont, CA, the most friggin boring American suburb imaginable. My family is from Perú so I grew up eating Cua Cuas and feeding them to my abuelitos’ chickens on long summer vacations.
A few years back, I took an online quiz that informed me that my power animal is a wolverine, which made me smile. My wife believes a mischievous crow would be more apt whereas my homeboy thinks my spirit animal should be “an angry hedgehog in an ugly sweater.”
My fiction, nonfiction, and music writing have been published in The Acentos Review, The Bay Bridged, Black Heart Magazine, BorderSenses Literary Magazine, The Cortland Review, Label Me Latina/o, Mount Hope, Origins Journal, Prairie Schooner, Somos en escrito, and Thread.
I am a proud member of the Voices of Our Nations Foundation (VONA) family where I worked with asha bandele (2009) and ZZ Packer (2011). The most joyous week I had in 2013 was when I attended the fiction workshop at the Community of Writers. I have been blessed with artist residencies at the Ucross Foundation and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (RIP) in beautiful Wyoming and at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In 2021, I served as a mentor in the Latinx in Publishing Writers Mentorship Program.
I received a bachelor of arts degree in cinema from San Francisco State University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing with a nonfiction emphasis from Saint Mary’s College of California. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and our son, who likes to call me “Daddyman.”