Latest Huizache news and updates
November 2024
Three poetry Collections from Huizache Contributors
Check out these new books by Huizache contributors. UC Davis MFA student Beth Suter’s review can be found here.
November 2024
Huizache releases its 11th issue!
Order now at Huizache’s store.
November 2024
Huizache 11 Cover Artist Gina M. Contreras
Gina M. Contreras’s artwork is provocative, honest, and raw. It’s also very funny. The cover art for Huizache’s eleventh issue depicts a naked woman staring longingly (we assume) at crude drawings of penises on school lined paper. It’s titled “Everybody Needs a Reminder Sometimes.” The piece makes me blush and all I’ve done is select it for our cover art. What must it be like for the artist to put down on paper her deepest fantasies, yearnings, and fears? It speaks to Contreras’s boldness, an artist who doesn’t care what others think, not her family, her lovers, or her audience—or rather, an artist who cares but still says it anyway. This is the kind of work that Huizache seeks to highlight.
Jade Meshew and Daniyel Souza-Wiggins, both MFA creative writing students at UC Davis, spoke with Gina about her process and inspirations. See their profile here.
– Maceo Montoya, Huizache Editor
May 2024
María Esquinca wins the 2024 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
The Huizache Literary Initiative is pleased to announce that María Esquinca is the recipient of the 2024 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Named after the late Chicano poet from Fresno, the prize honors Montoya’s enduring literary legacy. The new iteration of the prize was re-established at the University of California, Davis in collaboration with the New Oeste Series at the University of Nevada Press and continues to support the publication of a first book by a Latinx poet residing in the United States.
This year’s prize was judged by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who was assisted by first readers Anthony Cody, Hermelinda Hernandez, and Josiah Luis Alderete.
Juan Felipe Herrera writes: “María Esquinca cuts us loose—here we speak with each poem, we scream and howl, wounded. We taste every stat of migrant’s death, and survival, and offer God chants in Pocha riffs. Our tongue burns into many songs, dawns, and border scars under neon moons. Each line whips jagged and tosses us into today’s realities of struggle and brave new minds of transformation. This is the Time to cross the lines of María Esquinca’s fiery voice and onto ours.”
Read our full announcement here.
November 2023
Huizache releases its 10th issue!
Order now at Huizache’s store.
November 2023
Huizache at Beyond Baroque SoCal Poetry Festival
The Southern California Poetry Festival is an annual celebration of the art of poetry and the diversity of voices within Southern California. All programs and workshops are free.
On Saturday, November 18, the festival will feature generative workshops on the craft of poetry and present emerging voices of the SoCal Literary scene curated by Huizache, World Stage Press, Lambda Literary, Air/Light and more.
November 2023
Huizache 10 launch party at TANA in Woodland, CA
You are invited to Huizache’s 10th issue launch party on Friday, November 17, 2023 from 6-8PM at Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer. Join us as we celebrate this milestone with a special edition dust jacket that pays homage to legendary Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes, readings from Reyna Grande, Yaccaira Salvatierra, Shelby Pinkham, Oswaldo Vargas, Leticia del Toro, León Salvatierra, and Maceo Montoya. Enjoy live DJ music, delicious antojitos and refreshments, and a variety of Huizache copies that’ll be available for $15. Huizache’s tenth issue bursts with writers challenging, subverting, and upending the dominant narratives that reinforce the status quo—together this chorus of voices forges a vision of a new America. Join us for an evening of poetry that spans generations and communities, including highlighting the work of exciting emerging voices!
October 2023
Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Huizache, and UC Davis
Huizache, as part of the Huizache Literary Initiative at UC Davis, will now administer the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Read the article discussing the move here.
October 2023
Huizache takes over the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
Huizache, as part of a larger literary initiative at UC Davis, is taking over the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize! Established in 2004 by Letras Latinas at the University of Notre Dame, the prize has been an important outlet for emerging Latinx poets. The prize supports the publication of a first full-length book of poems by a Latinx poet residing in the United States. The judge for this year’s prize will be former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Submissions open November 1 and the winner will be announced on May 18, 2024, on what would’ve been Andrés Montoya’s 56th birthday. For more details visit andresmontoyapoetry.com.
The winning poet will receive $1000 from the Huizache Literary Initiative and a contract from University of Nevada Press as part of its New Oeste Series. Upon publication of the winning book, the Huizache Literary Initiative will extend an invitation to both the winner and the judge to give a joint reading at UC Davis. In addition, Letras Latinas will extend an invitation to the winner to present their work at the University of Notre Dame.
July 2023
Huizache’s Archive Now available Through Exact Editions
Now you can read the entire Huizache archive through the London-based Exact Editions. Subscriptions to Huizache are available for both individuals and institutions in the Exact Editions shops.
March 2023
Huizache’s Prose Editor Carribean Fragoza Wins Whiting Award
Congratulations, Carribean! Huizache’s prose editor recently named a Whiting Award winner. Read more here.
March 2023
Huizache at AWP 2023
Huizache will be at AWP! Or at least nearby. We’re hosting an off-site reading with six incredible Central American poets at Casa Latina located at 317 17th Ave S, Seattle, WA. Readers include Francisco Aragón, Adela Najarro, Janel Pineda, Cynthia Guardado, former Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna, and our very own poetry editor León Salvatierra. Hope to see you Thursday, March 9 at 6pm!
January 2023
Huizache in the Texas Observer
“Huizache, the premiere Chicanx literary magazine, was born in Texas but had to flee the state to find a home.” Read Roberto Ontiveros’s article in the Texas Observer.
January 2023
Huizache’s LA Launch Party
This Saturday 1/28 from 4-6pm, Huizache will have its LA Launch Party at Avenue 50 Studio! With readings from contributors Vanessa Díaz, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Lupita Limón Corrales, Yago Cura, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, and Carribean Fragoza.
December 2022
Huizache’s New Poetry Editors
Huizache welcomes Javier O. Huerta and León Salvatierra as its new poetry editors. They both bring invaluable experience as bilingual poets, scholars, and editors, and have collaborated since their days as PhD students at UC Berkeley. León migrated from Nicaragua to the United States when he was 15 and lived undocumented for eleven years. His poetry collection Al Norte/To the North, translated by Javier, explores his experience of exile, memory, and language, and is the subject of a recent profile in the Los Angeles Times. An associate editor at Latino Stories, he is also acquisitions editor for a new Latinx series at University of Nevada Press called The New Oeste. Javier, born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, immigrated to Houston, Texas, in 1981. He is the author of American Copia: An Immigrant Epic and Some Clarifications y otros poemas, which was awarded the 31st Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from the University of California, Irvine. Since the mid-2000s, Javier’s poetry and scholarship have explored the undocumented experience and foregrounded the explosion of undocumented literature in the past decade. Huizache is honored to have both Javier and León on board for its tenth issue!
November 2022
Huizache Now Housed at UC Davis
After a long hiatus, Huizache has found a new home at UC Davis under the editorship of Maceo Montoya. Read the article here.
November 2022
Huizache 9 has arrived!
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.
October 2022
Huizache Welcomes Carribean Fragoza as its new Prose Editor
Huizache is excited to welcome Carribean Fragoza as its new prose editor. We’re proud to have been one of the first to publish Carribean’s work in our fall 2014 issue. Her short story “Lumberjack Mom,” about a mother who takes an ax to the world around her, brilliantly blends dark humor and metaphor. It kicks off her groundbreaking collection Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, which was published in 2021 by City Lights Books. Her stories have been described as fabulist, surreal, magical realist, gothic, and even bone-chilling, all apt descriptions, but in truth her work is uncategorizable, one reason Carribean and Huizache are such a great fit. A finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, the New York Times called her book a “rare and significant achievement from a forceful new voice in American literature.” Huizache couldn’t agree more. The founder and co-director of the arts collective South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP) and until recently co-editor of Boom California, Carribean brings invaluable experience as an editor and cultural critic. Huizache is once again excited to feature another of Carribean’s stories in its upcoming fall 2022 issue. Of her editorial vision, Carribean shared that she’s “looking for stories yet to be told, and that push boundaries of genre and experiment with form to propose new approaches and goals for Latinx literature.” We look forward to her contributions to our tenth issue!
Huizache Media
La Bloga
September 17, 2024
Huizache Eleven in View
