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.

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.