Discipline/Field: Fiction

Based in: San Francisco, CA

About: Alysia Gonzales attends the MFA program at San Francisco State in the city where she was born and raised. She is of Chicanx, Latinx, Filipinx, Indigineous and other diverse ancestry, and her work grapples with cultural colonization and fostering a reunification, or decolonization of self to conserve those things within that others have sought to eradicate. 

Project Title: Becoming the Town Bruja and Other Unlikely Events is a novella that explores a connection to the land that has been powerful and important long before it was called, “California.” Set in a mountain town on a lake’s edge, the stories follow Carmen as she navigates the liminal space between her reclusive Mama and Tía and the townsfolk’s suspicion of her family’s brujería practice when their cattle begin to die en masse from some unknown, gruesome disease.

Relevant links: Twitter, @alysiasays; Instagram, @alysiasees; website, alysiagonzales.com