March 15, 2021
We are thrilled to announce that UNDOCUMENTS by John-Michael Rivera won a 2021 Eugene M. Kayden Book Award!
The Kayden awards, which are funded from the Eugene M. Kayden endowment, are intended to promote the completion of research and creative work in the arts and humanities, research leading to publication, and the celebration and dissemination of excellent arts and humanities research. The Kayden awards come with funding for the author’s department to organize a symposium, which will involve both the author and experts in the author’s field who will present critiques of the book to which the author will respond. The symposium will be open to the wider academic community and the public.

Employing a broad range of writing genres and scholarly approaches, UNDOCUMENTS catalogs, recovers, and erases documents and images by and about peoples of Greater Mexico from roughly the first colonial moment. This brave and bracing volume organizes and documents ancient New World Mexican peoples from the Florentine Codex (1592) to our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.
John-Michael Rivera is an associate professor and writer at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he serves as director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric. He has published memoir, creative nonfiction, poetry, and scholarship. He is the curator of El Laboratorio, a literary space for Latinx writers, and was co-founder of Shadowbox Magazine, a literary journal for creative nonfiction.
Congratulations, John-Michael!