The University of Arizona Press

Date: Thursday, November 16, 2023

Time: 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m, CDT

Where: José Cisneros Cielo Vista Branch Library, 1300 Hawkins Blvd., El Paso

Daniel Chacón, host of “Words on a Wire” and author of Kafka in a Skirt, will speak with Alma García about her debut novel, All That Rises. García’s novel will be available for purchase and signing.

Alma García is a writer whose award-winning short fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and most recently in phoebe and the anthology Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. She is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Originally from El Paso and later from Albuquerque, she now lives in Seattle, where she teaches fiction writing at the Hugo House and is a manuscript consultant. This is her first novel.

Daniel Chacón is a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas, El Paso. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. He is the author of several books, including The Cholo Tree and Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops, which won the 2014 PEN Oakland Award for Literary Excellence.

About the book:

All That Rises is a story of families and conflict in El Paso, Texas. In this novel, mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.