Category Archives: Huizache News

Huizache #9

Huizache is back, bold and beautiful!

The nation’s leading Latinx literary magazine now calls California’s Central Valley home, so it’s fitting that Huizache 9 features valley grown legends like Luis Valdez, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Gary Soto, with cover art from Chicana icon Ester Hernandez. Only Huizache showcases the well-knowns like Tim Seibles, Emmy Pérez, and Willie Perdomo with new generation voices like Sara Borjas, Carribean Fragoza, and José Olivarez. And we mix in the soon-to-be well known poets Monica Rico, Natasha Carrizosa, Jose Hernandez Diaz, and Andrés Cerpa, future-star fiction from María Isabel Álvarez, and a portfolio of striking images from Fronterizo/Bordeño printmakers: this is Huizache’s ninth edition!

Huizache may be rooted in the Southwest and the West, but we’re staking our claim to being the magazine of a New America. From the north and south of the Eastern seaboard, across the Midwest, along the Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona borderlands, and rising into the wide breadth of California to the upper reaches of the Pacific Northwest, our voices, the voices of Huizache, sing with originality and howl with passion, reorienting language and narrative, imploding the old preconceptions of our community, culture, and identity. After a difficult absence, this comeback issue, h9, overflows with what was dammed for three long years: writers who refuse to be detained, categorized, labeled, or constrained, who, like the magazine’s namesake, the huizache tree, refuse to be rooted out and flower brilliant gold year after year.

Now accepting submissions for Huizache #9!

After a long hiatus, Huizache is excited to announce that it will be publishing its 9th issue in fall 2022 and is currently accepting submissions in prose and poetry. Visit our submissions page for more info.

Since 2011, Huizache has been at the forefront of Latinx literature and art. It has featured works by poet laureates, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, and winners of many prestigious awards. Founding editor Dagoberto Gilb wanted Huizache to be the preeminent magazine of Latinx literature, focusing on innovative prose and poetry that exploded preconceived notions of what Latinx literature should be. Dagoberto put it best in a 2013 Los Angeles Times interview when he declared: “I want punk, I want classical, so long as it’s obsessed with what it’s doing and good. I hate do-gooder pedo. I like skilled art that knows the smartest, that doesn’t try to dupe the stupid or naïve. Willful craft. I want quality from artists who don’t think they ever get it right but move on anyway.”

In its first decade, Huizache published some of the most important and influential Latinx writers spanning generations, from early trailblazers like José Montoya, Juan Felipe Herrera, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Benjamín Alire Sáenz, and Luis J. Rodriguez to the most prominent contemporary authors like Rigoberto González, Willie Perdomo, Reyna Grande, Carmen Giménez Smith, Michele Serros, Manuel Muñoz, Alex Espinoza, Achy Obejas, and Héctor Tobar. Huizache is also proud to have featured the newest voices in Latinx literature who have since gone on to publish celebrated books, including Laurie Ann Guerrero, Aracelis Girmay, Joseph Rios, Isabel Quintero, Fernando A. Flores, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, ire’ne lara silva, and Javier Zamora. While Huizache’s focus may be on Latinx literature, the magazine also publishes writers of diverse backgrounds such as Sherman Alexie, Naomi Shihab Nye, Cornelius Eady, Joshunda Sanders, Tim Seibles, Terrance Hayes, Bryan Washington, and Dana Johnson, embracing an editorial vision that understands the Latinx community doesn’t exist in isolation and nor should its writers.

As promised in its first issue, Huizache continues to provide a home for voices that are often overlooked or, when seen, deliberately ignored. To hold the first eight issues of Huizache is to hold the history of a people that is as persistent and gold as the magazine’s namesake, the huizache tree. Huizache #9 aims to add to that legacy.

Huizache #6

Huizache #6 has arrived! Our newest issue is great reading, and with the beautiful cover art by legendary Chicano artist John Valdez, you’ll look great reading it! Huizache #6 offers prose from El Paso’s Christine Granados, Denver’s Sheryl Luna, Oakland’s Aida Salazar; from award-winning playwright Octavio Solis, filmmaker/author Jesús Salvador Treviño, and New Orleans’s Bryan Washington. Poets in h6 include California’s Lisa Alvarez, Texas’s Abigail Carl-Klassen, Mexico’s Christina Rivera Garza, New York’s Paco Marquez, Michigan’s Rachel Nelson and New Mexico’s Joaquin Zihuatanejo. And if that’s not enough, we’ve put linocuts by LA printmaker Daniel González throughout the issue. Check out the full contents, or better yet…just buy it right now.

Tim Seibles Becomes Virginia’s Poet Laureate

Tim Seibles (Old Dominion)

Tim Seibles, a contributor to the debut issue of Huizache, has just been named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Terry McAullife (whose name you might recognize as one of the Clintons’ biggest political partners, but that is another story). We are proud to have shown off his work and prouder still to see his career doing so well!

The official announcement from the Governor’s office is pretty cool (you can also find out who was named to the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park Authority!). More info comes from the press release from Old Dominion, where Tim Seibles teaches (and from whom I stole the picture of Tim). And you can check out Tim’s page at The American Academy of Poets to learn more about his work.

THIS WEEK ON LATINOPIA 1.24.16

The good folks over at latinopia.com have just posted a video of me talking about Mexican American Literature: A Portable Anthology, an awesome new book I co-edited with Huizache EIC Dagoberto Gilb.

If you don’t know Latinopia, you’ve been missing out. Latinopia is an incredible online resource, full of video interviews, profiles, readings, recipes, music, blogs and all sorts other things Chicano and Latino, with more stuff getting added all the time. The site owes its existence to the tremendous effort and talents of producer Jesus Treviño. Jesus has been gathering materials for pretty much forever, so the site has decades of images and videos that you would never find if not for the site. One of my favorites is a video of José Montoya reading his legendary poem “El Louie” about a pachuco who, just like me and Jesus, is from ol’ EPT.

from Huizache #5

Huizache #5 Now Available!

Huizache #5 (Fall 2015) is now available! It’s a big and beautiful issue, with cover art by Diana Gamboa and full-color images of the work of Claude Fiddler inside, along with tons of great poetry and prose. If you can’t find it at your local bookstore, tell the owners that you’d love to see it on the shelves. In the meantime, you can buy a copy (or two, or three, or a hundred) through us. The table of contents is below, and there’s even a couple pieces available online so you can have a little prueba before it gets to your mailbox.

Huizache #5, Fall 2015

Vanessa Diaz: Once Was

Vanessa Diaz: La tal Yvonne

María López: The Mud Family Climbs the Mountain

María López: Oysters

Javier Zamora: Abuelita Nelli’s Garden with Parakeet That Says Hijaputa To the Drawer Awaiting My Return

Jessica Helen Lopez: Suzi Writes a Poem

Yago Cura: Certain Blondes

Los Angeles County Jail Sonnets #8

Fernando A. Flores: The Eight Incarnations of Pascal’s Fifth

Monique Quintana: Good Girls

Cornelius Eady: Photo (retouched)

Cornelius Eady: The Grey Goose

devorah major: city scat

devorah major: history of the canary island whistlers

Gina Valdés: Loyalty to the Humble

Gina Valdés: In the Land of Zapata

Manuel Muñoz: Presumido

J.A.GomezM: Every Bird Leaves the Nest

José Angel Araguz: To Lupito on His First Communion

José Angel Araguz: Desire

Lisa Alvarez: Previous Trees

Brandon Williams: Bullshitting with Waiters, Alameda Sushi House

Tonya Wiley: Polaroids of Seattle

HUIZACHE Five

Huizache #5, Fall 2015

The fifth issue of Huizache is as stunning as its predecessors: a ’60s throwback cover by Los Angeles artist Diane Gamboa, full-color plates by Caribbean painter Claude Fiddler, poetry by one of the East Coast’s most beloved poets, Cornelius Eady, fiction by the still-rising Chicano star Manuel Muñoz, an essay by a Chicana already in the pantheon, Denise Chávez, a mythic origin memoir by a homeless Colombiana in New York City, María López. Huizache offers work from the edges, the corners, and above all from our own side of America: El Paso, San Antonio, Chicago, Tucson, Austin, San Francisco, Mexicali, Fullerton, San Diego, Fresno, Los Angeles. Alongside work by the well-known devorah major, Glenn Taylor, Pat LittleDog, and ir’ene lara silva, h5 proudly welcomes new voices such as Fernando Flores, Vanessa Diaz, and Javier Zamora.

Huizache continues to thrive in the Latino West, loudly proclaiming the beauty of its bloom. In this era when its roots—its Mexican character, its Mexican heritage—are not just dismissed or ignored but attacked as in a xenophobe’s fantasy cartoon, this magazine expands our artistic boundaries. It exults in the life of those of us who are passively considered not born well or good enough, actively admiring the dynamic work that might otherwise go unseen.

Get your copy today!

Tameka Cage Conley’s “Rise” Debuts in Washington, DC

Tameka Cage Conley’s “Rise” – a cantata with music by Judah Adashi – premiered this weekend in Washington, DC. The Washington Post was there:

“The Cantate Chamber Singers , for a 30th anniversary season, gave a doozy of a commission: a cantata about race in America, focusing on the events of Selma, Ala., in 1965, but incorporating references to the whole range of subsequent history. The result, “Rise,” with music by Judah Adashi and poetry by Tameka Cage Conley, had its world premiere Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitan AME church in downtown Washington, with the elite Howard University vocal ensemble “Afro Blue” mingling its voices with Cantate’s chorus.”

Tameka Cage Conley’s fiction appeared in our third issue and her poetry in our fourth.