The University of Arizona Press
February 3, 2022
University of Arizona Press author and editor Frederick Luis Aldama will be inducted in the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) at the organization’s annual meeting and banquet in El Paso, Texas on April 22-23, 2022. The event will also include the Annual TIL Literary Awards.
Founded in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievement, TIL’s membership consists of the state’s most respected writers–including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Academy Award, Americas Award, International Latino Book Award, Lambda Literary Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.
Membership is based on ongoing and exceptional literary accomplishment. Aldama is one of 15 new members approved for 2022 fiction and nonfiction authors.
Sergio Troncoso, president of the Texas Institute of Letters states, “The Texas Institute of Letters continues to identify and honor outstanding writers from all literary genres. Our newest members have expanded literary audiences to include diverse voices and readers, and have opened minds with books that reconsider history and scholarship. We are extremely proud of the outstanding work that these writers represent: children’s stories full of empathy and humor, poetry that breaks open the heart to imagine new perspectives, prose that challenges narrative forms and explores
psychological complexities, and publishing that finds and amplifies voices on the margins of society. These fifteen masters of the word include novelists, short-story writers, poets, memoirists, publishers, children’s authors, and scholars.”
Aldama is the author of over forty books, which he has authored, co-authored, and edited, including Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands and Eisner Award-winner Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, both published by the University of Arizona Press. Aldama is also co-editor of the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture Series.
In his newest book with the Press, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward. TV narratives by and about Latinx people exist across all genres. In this century, we see Latinx people in sitcoms, sci-fi, noir, soap operas, rom-coms, food shows, dramas, action-adventure, and more. Latinx people appear in television across all formats, from quick webisodes, to serialized big-arc narratives, to animation and everything in between. The diverse array of contributors to this volume delve into this rich landscape of Latinx TV from 2000 to today, spanning the ever-widening range of genres and platforms.
