Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera Garza was born in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Raised in a family that moved between the two countries for generations, she continued that tradition by pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Houston after completing her undergraduate and master’s studies in Mexico.

Rivera Garza is among Mexico’s most celebrated and prolific writers. Her work, written primarily in Spanish, spans novels, short stories, poetry, nonfiction, and more. Describing herself as a migrant writer, she probes ideas of language, memory, and gender from a transnational perspective. She is a distinguished professor in Hispanic studies and founder and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, the first of its kind in the nation.

In 2023, she published Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a memoir tracing her younger sister’s life and investigating her 1990 murder. The book was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction and received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. Rivera Garza is also a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, among numerous other honors.

In her most recent book in English, Autobiography of Cotton, Rivera Garza reconstructs a 1934 labor strike on the U.S.-Mexico border. The book raises questions about the artificial nature of borders and the fundamental role of migration. “Movement in search of better conditions — that is the basis of what we do as humans,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

Published June 2026