Interview with Percival Everett, Author of “James” and Oona Uishama Narváez, Kenneth Dyer-Redner, and Rey M. Rodríguez

The Storyteller’s Corner of Chapter House, the literary journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts, started the academic year with the dream of uplifting voices of some of the most exciting Indigenous and people of color writers through interviews and book reviews. We began this journey with the extraordinary m.s. RedCherries, who taught us, among other lessons, that stories are not constrained by categories such as poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, but instead should be thought of in the tradition of our ancestors and how they wanted to communicate wisdom to others.

Her book, mother, would later be named as a finalist for the National Book Award. We should have known that her great fortune would lead to a whole string of amazing authors agreeing to be interviewed from Layli Long Soldier, Jake Skeets, Debra Magpie Earling, Tommy Orange, Deborah Jackson Taffa, Ramona, Emerson, Kinsale Drake, Elise Paschen, Jaime Figueroa, Kaveh Akbar, Sergio Troncoso, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Luis J. Rodríguez, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Bettye Kearse, Reyna Grande, Luz Schweig, and Octavillo Quintanilla.

All of them are exceptionally accomplished and occupied with their writing and careers, and yet they gave of their time to be interviewed by us. We at Chapter House are always humbled by their grace. So you can imagine when Percival Everett, someone who had just won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his book James, agreed to be interviewed over Zoom by Oona Uishama Narváez, Kenneth Dyer-Redner, and me. We were overwhelmed. We could never have imagined that our initial dream of uplifting such powerful voices would include such a literary luminary.

Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books, including twenty-three novels, four short-story collections, six books of poetry, and a title for children. He writes in many different genres because of his innate desire to create art. He has written crime novels, revisionist westerns, absurdist capers, thrillers, farces, and a book of poetry about fishing, among many others. Each one pursues his desire to describe our innate humanity.

Born in Georgia in 1956, Everett grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. He graduated from the University of Miami. He then studied the philosophy of language at the University of Oregon. Later, he switched to a master’s program in fiction at Brown University. Percival Everett is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California.

As with all of the other interviews, we hope that you will gain insight into the art of writing and why, at a time when our stories are threatened to be erased, it is more important than ever that we write them down and send them out into the universe.

RMR: Percival Everett, thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed by the Storytellers’ Corner of Chapter House, the Literary Journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We started this project after we asked m.s. RedCherries at an IAIA writers’ residency, how Chapter House could better uplift Indigenous voices. The answer was to interview exciting writers and poets, and she became our first interviewee. Recently, we learned how important the work is, because Chapter House was the only literary journal to interview her for her book, mother, in this long format, even though she had been named as a National Book Award finalist.

So this is a long way to say thank you for agreeing to be interviewed, because it will help us shed light on Indigenous and other voices who so desperately need to be heard at this time, when the regime is actively attempting to erase marginalized stories.

Let’s get started. In James, chapter 16, you write, “With my pencil I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”

I know you express yourself in many different ways, such as through poetry, painting, horseback riding, fishing, tennis, and teaching. But what was your journey for writing yourself into being? And how did you write yourself to here?

Let's not start with a hard question.

I just want to make art. That's what I do. It's my way of understanding the world of being in it. It's my way of understanding the culture I live in. What's good and bad about it. If you want to understand a place, you look at its art and then you look at the people who consume it.

You're not going to learn much by looking at the artist. But when you look at the work and the people who consume it, then you start to learn about a place. I'm still coming into being.

It's a moving target. I'm a different person every day. So what I think I know turns out I don't know. I have two teenage sons, so I know how much I don't know. They tell me every day.

The thing is, for artists, we're always trying to find our way.

RMR: And when did you pick up your pencil to do so?

According to my parents, I always had notebooks I would write in. I don't remember them at all. And I don't have them. I played music when I was younger, and then I started painting. I didn't start writing until I became disenchanted with philosophy. I was working on a Ph.D. in philosophy, and decided I hated philosophers and started writing fiction. I was writing fiction, anyway, to create scenes for the examples when writing philosophy. So, it was not an inorganic move. It made sense.

RMR: Through so much of your work, you provide a powerful counter-narrative to the social construction of race, which permits us to better see our humanity. And as a writer, when do you feel you are most successful at attacking the false narrative of race, when, as Desmond Tutu is quoted as saying, “The funny thing is that we're all African.” So I'm curious, when do you think you're most successful at poking at this mythology of the social construction of race that has been built up and that is harming us?

Well, of course, the irony of the idea of race is that it's a construction of anthropologists. As early as the turn of the 20th century, in the 1900s, they abandoned the notion of race as a legitimate category.

But we function in this world as if it exists, and we've created markers, and we've created distinctions.

And so I don't know when I'm successful doing it. All I try to do is tell the truth about the irony, the absurdity of the notion, and how we employ the category.

RMR: Along those lines, I wanted to ask you about The Book of Training. I found it so painful to read because of its subject. What was it like to write that book? What did you learn from writing it? And why was it so important to write?

Well, I try to think about what would allow one person to enslave another. What has to be going on in that person's mind? The first thing that has to happen is that they have to cancel the humanity of the person that they're enslaving. They have to somehow see that person as a mere animal.

I work with horses all the time, and there are thousands of books about training horses, since someone who occupies that space of a slave owner is viewing the enslaved as an animal, then, and I assume that they must have likewise had a literature about training that animal. The book underscores the absurdity of anyone justifying that behavior. So that's what I was trying to do.

RMR: You have notations in the margins, like someone marking it up as if they're annotating it so that they can really study this. How did you come up with that idea?

I don't know. It just came to me.

RMR: Do you mark up books in the margins in general?

No, I don't write in books, but I always appreciate when other people do. I love buying a used book, and it's got someone's notes in it. First, I hate it, but then it turns out they're kind of interesting.

RMR: That's really true.

OUN: I also had a question on The Book of Training…because I read that poetry collection was your attempt at writing a slave narrative, and I was quite interested in why you decided to return to this framework with James? What were the differences in writing from the perspective of a slave owner and an enslaved runaway?

I was so sick of slave movies and slave novels because the character was always slavery, not anybody, and also the depiction of the enslaved was always so lacking in humanity, but also just lacking in creative depth, so I was addressing that with James, but I do suffer from work amnesia. I don't remember what made me write these books. I'm lucky to remember anything that's in any of them. When you mentioned The Book of Training…, I don't remember a word of it, and if I hadn't had to talk about James so much for the past year, I wouldn't remember anything in there, either. I'm interested in people being represented as fully rendered, complete people, regardless of who they are, though in The Trees, I don't do that favor to white people, and I said it to my wife. I'm not being very fair to white people. And then I said, Well, fuck it.

OUN: I read The Trees and James within a similar timeframe, and both those novels place a strong emphasis on the function of names and naming. The importance of naming or coming into a name also appears in Glyph and I’m Not Sydney Poitier as well. What is the function of names and naming for you, because while they can be an identifier and a way to categorize, they also can be a way to come into one’s own individuality?

Well, naming is important. It's a performative act. When you name someone, you have done something to them that is their name. The difficulty involved in changing a name is fascinating. If you want to do it legally, you have to go through the courts. If you want to just be called something different, you have to tell everyone. And it's a social thing. If I lived on an island by myself, I would never think to change my name, no matter what it was, because there would be no one to call it. It's all about other people, their perception, and power. You change your name. You've taken some power away. People arrive at a place first, or they think they've arrived there first, or they claim to have arrived there first, and what do they do? They change the name to Mount McKinley. So there's a whole lot in that, which is why we see this present regime going back to things like that.

OUN: That's quite interesting, especially when you get into the social aspects, and the lines of public and private spheres, which I think are also essential to the way that bodies are read in your work, such as in The Body of Martin Aguilera, The Trees, and American Desert. I’m curious about how you go about writing about bodies that can come off quite grotesque to readers? Especially since even though these characters occupy some physical abject form, they are still surrounded by so much humor and grace.

First of all, I seldom do this, but I would love for you to read my story. Oh, what is the title of it? I can't remember which book it's in. And I can't remember the character’s first name, Archuleta, who keeps having accidents that disfigure the left side of his body so much so that people start talking about him as two distinct Archuletas, and he starts to believe it. And in a bar fight, this man is looking to hit him, and he turns his other side to him, and the man can't find the right Archuleta to hit. So it's all about the body. Again, the absurd thing is that we live in these shells. It's fascinating to me. And unlike a turtle's, it doesn't do much to protect us. But you know, just hearing you talk about it makes me think that I might have had some smart thoughts. I like just listening to you.

OUN: Reading your novels, I was quite pleasantly surprised when I’d come across Mexican and Native American characters whose existence felt natural. It didn’t feel like there was a motive or quota they were meant to serve. Your works have such an extensive cast of characters who come from various backgrounds in terms of race, age, and class. Is this an organic facet of your writing or is it something you put a lot of intention into?

I was very lucky, I got to live with Arapaho and Shoshone people for a year and a half, and I really respect people's stuff. I would never be able to write from the point of view of a Native person, but I've spent a lot of time with Native people and so I can write about those people. The people I know and what they would say and do without thinking that I'm representing anybody but them, those particular individuals. So I'm never trying to represent a group because nobody exists as a group. Everybody exists individually with the stuff of their worlds around them.

So I try to. I do think that I try to. I was inculturated in America. It's not hard to become a racist in America, and if I don't accept that, then I'm doomed to practice it. So I am always thinking about that.

And the other thing about bodies is, I don't know if you know the photography of Diane Arbus?

OUN: Oh, yes, I love her.

She takes pictures of people that we would call deformed and freakish. I hate those words, but her photographs: they carve right through all of that and show us people, and that's just fascinating. It's amazing work. One of the things she said that I used in the beginning as a quote of So Much Blue is “A picture is a secret about a secret.” and I'm not sure I'm smart enough to understand that.

KDR: So I read in an interview that you had been offered a job at the University of Wyoming, and you responded that you'll do it if you could live on the Wind River Reservation.

Yeah. I don't know why I said that.

KDR: Yes, that was my question. What compelled you to make that offer?

I honestly don't know, because I turned them down at first, and then I thought about it, and I'd had no connection to any Native peoples.

KDR: Yes, that was my follow-up question. What was your interaction or experience with Native peoples or communities prior to that?

I did have one interaction, which was, I interviewed the chief of the Narragansetts. I don't know why I went and sought her out and interviewed her. I read an anthropologist's article called “The Last of the Mohegans,” which was an imaginary fictional name, a fictitious name that the anthropologist had made up. But, it was about whether the Narragansetts were a legitimate group. The Narragansetts having had their tribal status taken away or sold in the early 20th century, and they dispersed. Then they came back and tried to re-establish, but of course, when they came back, they had art that looked like Lakota and paintings that looked like Cherokee, and all this different stuff coming together. And so that was challenged. And, finally, they were granted tribal status again. But they had to prove that they were a people, which is fascinating to me.

KDR: Yes, that is. I'm sort of curious about this idea of a Pan-Indian identity that encompasses these different symbols of their own identity. And I think there's a good reason for that, because of the erasure of Indigenous peoples and cultures and language and stuff as well. So I'm not faulting anybody. I've participated in Pan-Indian ceremonies myself, like the sweat lodge and other things as well. But the other thing that I was sort of curious about was your experience on the Wind River Reservation. I think, in that same interview, you had said that you didn't ever feel like an outsider on the Wind River Reservation because of the sense of humor that the Native people had. I was wondering if you could speak to your experience with those people, and the sarcasm, sense of humor, those sorts of things.

A lot of sarcasm. Yeah, which is great, and just a real developed sense of irony. The first joke I learned was: How do you make 500 Indians say “Shit.”

KDR: How?

“Bingo.” And, it was great! I have to back up a bit because I just remembered that I had an earlier experience when I was in graduate school. I had volunteered at a place for alcohol and drug abuse for Native people. This was mostly in Oregon, so there were Warm Springs and Umpqua and I met a lot of people, and I'd forgotten about this…Oh, now it comes back.

I have a short story about this great big Native guy who gets violent when he drinks, and my character in the story said he will bring the Native guy home to his wife or something…and this happened to me! I went to the bar, and I can't remember his name, and he saw me and he said “Percival” and punched me. He was a really big guy, and I'm not a really big guy. And so I hugged him.

I wrapped myself around him while he beat me on my back until he passed out, and then I took him out to my little Fiat. I had a little Fiat, and I looked at the car, and I thought, “Is he going to fit in this car?” And I stuffed him in and we drove away just as the police were arriving.

I just didn't want him to go to jail. His wife had called me. That's right. And she said, “Would you go get him so he doesn't go to jail?” I just remembered that story. And we laughed about that later. That’s the whole thing of laughing, at least on the Wind River reservation, they would tell each other gag jokes and tell dirty jokes. But, it was so much fun. It was sort of the turf of that relationship. So there were things like that.

KDR: Yes, that's funny. So one of the things that I'm also curious about is this idea of nothingness. So in Dr. No, the main character is a mathematician, but he's not very good at math, and he studies this concept of nothing. And in my head, I'm just trying to make these connections. I'm thinking the United States’ goal was to eliminate American Indian people, not only physically, but also to eliminate their identities by eliminating their languages and cultures and whatnot. And then, for the descendants of those people to attempt to find some sense of identity through this notion of authenticity. But maybe approaching gaps of knowledge where they don't really have the access or the knowledge to whatever those cultural items are. And so then there's this idea of “nothingness” or “absence” in that and I’m just curious, what are your thoughts about this idea of a group of people attempting to figure out who they are but not having access to it? And then, how does that contribute to this idea of pointing out the absurdity through humor?

Well, the contradictions. The Dawes Act and the Indian Relocation Act, all these things are meant to fuck with people, essentially. The joke on the reservation that I lived on was the Indian Relocation Act. They take a guy to San Francisco and he'd be back on the reservation before the BIA got back.

But, if you just think about the tensions there were on the Wind River reservation. If you want to live there, there are really three jobs you can do. You can be a teacher, a cop, or in the health profession. The friends I made who left to go to college, how do you return if you can't work, but you want it? But if you leave, then you feel you're losing your culture. That's a terrible place to be.

The whole per capita payment thing, and not being able to sell land and stuff, and it's so complicated. You see analogous stuff in other marginalized communities. Poor Black people in neighborhoods feel the same way. If you go get an education, you can't go back to where you came from. Well, you can, but then you're different, and your world is different. And for Native peoples, it's really amplified.

In California, it's kind of sneaky. You were talking about Pan-Indianism. In California, we have all these little reservations, and so no one has any political power. Whereas if you said, “Okay, you're all together.” Then all of a sudden, there's a voice. And then the American tradition of housing traditional enemies adjacent to each other on the same reservation. They didn’t get along historically, but there they are, right next to each other. That's not an accident. That's an attempt to create another problem that keeps people out of the political world.

KDR: Yes. And then, I was just thinking about this idea of the perception of self. How Native people see stereotypical images of themselves in the media. There's this notion that to be Native, it feels like you need to…

Conform.

KDR: Yes, you know, this pressure that you need to conform, or you need to project this sort of almost stereotypical image. And then there's the influence, if I leave my reservation, or if I leave my community, then I become less Native. I'm curious about how one perceives oneself through the perception of an outsider. And, how your work explores some of these racial constructions, and this idea of trying to find yourself through art. And so, in what ways can artists and writers dilute this feeling that you need to conform, you know? How can you project a more authentic image?

Well, one is to get rid of the idea that they have to perform. There's a range in any group of people’s persona. Vine Deloria, Jr. would present differently from Peterson Zah. They are different people. Some individuals appeal more to the mainstream because they're performing. It seems that they're performing almost minstrelsy. They're giving what the world expects. And I think of someone like, I don't dislike the guy, Steve Harvey. He acts a certain way, and I think it makes a lot of white people comfortable because he's fulfilling their expectations. If that's him, that's fine. I have no problem with him, but the problem is in the perception and who's doing the receiving and how it works for them. Now, you could also imagine that someone does this intentionally in a mercenary way, to achieve a certain end, and how can you tell the difference? And so I choose not to be judgmental in any way. But I know that it's possible.

RMR: You incorporate Voltaire and Locke into James. Why is that so important to bring in these Western philosophers into your writing? Is it a foil? Or is it a form of revenge writing for all of the philosophers that you didn't want to study anymore?

I'm sure it's all of those things. My training is in Western philosophy, and so many of the ideas that I discuss I perceive through the world of philosophy. But also, I want to discuss the hypocrisy. Any philosophy generated within a culture is fascinating to me. But those guys are stand-ins for Thomas Jefferson, who was another Enlightenment thinker. He just didn't leave any philosophical treatises that would have been available to my character, so I couldn't take him on directly. But he is an example of that Enlightenment philosophy, the hypocrisy where he's able to write, “We hold that all men are created equal,” while he's owning slaves. You see that hypocrisy even in Voltaire, which would have been the most progressive of the thinkers of this notion. Yes, well, all being okay to be equal, but you have to earn that equality. I find that fascinating, and it's interesting to me how philosophical thinking can be shaped to allow that kind of, well, poor thinking.

OUN: There are so many philosophers who are trickled into your novels, but I did notice that Roland Barthes makes multiple appearances from Glyph to Erasure, and one could even say he has some influence on Percival Everett by Virgin Russell. I've read quite a bit of his work, and I have a love-hate relationship with him and was quite surprised by his recurrent role in your work. What has his influence and function been for you throughout the years?

In Erasure, there's the essay “F/V” which is the other unvoiced and voiced fricative, the first, the other one being S/Z. I'm doing to S/Z the same thing he did to Balzac. Which I find ridiculous, there's no meaning at the end of his treatment of Balzac. So it's just a game, and in that way, I appreciate the game and the real vacuity of the entire exercise, but it's entertaining in some way.

He shows up again as a representative of that especially French intellectual sort of mid-20th-century period of playfulness. He has “The Death of the Author,” yet he puts his name on everything he writes, so you know. Foucault has the essay, “Who is an Author?” which is great, you know it’s not that there is no subject– Foucault is different from the other guys, he is trying, but Barthes is not trying at all.

OUN: He's quite impatient in his writing, and I thought you nailed that quite well in Glyph, which points to another thing you sometimes do in your writing, where you have these recognizable figures who are characters in your novels. Another example is Jane Fonda in I'm Not Sydney Portier, when coming by these famous names, I kept on thinking about the choice to use identifiable names and people?

I'm just having fun. Jane Fonda just happened to be married to Ted Turner, and I was using him as the mogul. He's a funny guy, I mean, and interesting. He gave a billion dollars to the UN because the U.S. wouldn't. He became interesting to me, and when I was very young, I had a chance to meet him only in passing; he wouldn't remember me at all, but I watched him with other people, and he was like that. He was talking about ADHD, he was just all over the place, and I like that, and sort of unfortunately, I'm a little bit like that. Maybe not as sharp, but all over the place.

KDR: One of the things that I like about your work is the irony, the satire, and the sense of humor. You talked about performing, but I am curious about your thoughts on humor as a result of trauma or historical trauma.

Well, you know, people resort to the absurdity of their situations and laugh at it. Not because it's funny, but because it's absurd, and well, and then it is funny, too. It's a defense mechanism that we all have that allows us to endure. You know, and it allows us to laugh at ourselves. Because once you stop laughing at yourself and your situation, then you, Oh, God! You might as well be white.

KDR: Ha! Yeah, I was listening to an interview. I think it was Rick Rubin, the music producer guy. And he said that laughter is important because you can tell when something is good, because you'll laugh at it, even if it's not funny. I thought that was interesting. Like, if you stumble on something, maybe you're working on this traumatic scene, and then you kind of just chuckle, because it's the absurdity. But also, it's like, maybe there's something there, because it's drawing out this laughter to deal with the situation.

Yeah, and I'm never trying to be funny. That's it. It's because it is. And if I try to be funny, it never works.

RMR: What I love about James is there's this code switching that happens, and you do it seamlessly, in terms of what his real voice is and what his almost performative voice has to be to be perceived as an enslaved person. As a writer, how do you hone your skills to be able to code-switch like that? In Spanish, for example, we're constantly code-switching in terms of language. How do you do that? I feel you capture their essence.

Oh, well, we all do it so seamlessly, because it's life. When I was a teenager. My first job was carrying hides of brick up to the third floor up these ramps. I remember this guy in charge of the construction site would come around, and these old Black guys would talk to him and they would say, “Yes, sir, yes, sir,” and as soon as he was out of sight, they'd say “asshole,” but in a completely different voice.

And so it's just something, you're doing it. And I like watching people and listening. If you want, it's never anything big. It's little things like that we all have heard, and we all see, and we can all pull up. It's just trying to be truthful about people.

RMR: I know you read Twain's book 15 times, or something like that.

Don't remind me.

RMR: But to get the language, right?

Well, you know, it's a kind of music, and it's improvised music, which is one of the things I was trying to do when James codeswitches often, he doesn't say it the same way.

RMR: Hmm.

He says it in different ways to satisfy the white audience. But there is no language. It's constantly being made up like jazz. The last thing a jazz performer will do is play the same solo note for note. That's what other people do with jazz solos, but not the jazz player.

OUN: It's interesting when you hear people talk about the processes of writing, they often talk about things like “craft” and “modes”, but what strikes me when reading your work is I feel like I’m reading the work of someone who places reading above writing, especially when thinking of the eclectic nature of your work, and I think this is further articulated in the way you place such a large emphasis on your own experiences as a reader both for it’s generative and subversive qualities.

I never think about genre. I wrote a novel called God's Country as a parody of the Western and to write that I read a hundred pulp fiction Westerns. They were horrible. And I watched all these Western movies, enough Western movies that I now teach a course on Western film. I did it because that world never existed. It's all fake. It's a complete mythology. I wanted to create a Western language that you would use. That sounds like the ones you get in the films and the novels, but it is not. And I defy anyone to define that language. So that's what I wanted to do.

I don't believe in craft. We can handle almost any craft question you have in one sentence. You see in chapter headings in things like how to write a novel, things like, setting, well it has to happen someplace, setting taken care of. Dialogue: They have to talk to each other. Character: Somebody has to be the person talking. They’re all so simple, and there are no shortcuts.

The way we get to it is by reading and by watching people and forgetting and remembering that there is no such thing as real dialogue. This is where we become magicians. If you were to go out and recite the best dialogue from your favorite novel that you've memorized with a friend on a bus, everyone would think you were nuts because it is not real speech.

Likewise, if we wrote our conversation here down in a novel, people will say “What shitty dialogue”, but it's not the same thing, and that’s the real thing that we fiction writers have to learn and that just comes with, you know, it's a muscle. You just practice and practice, and then you start hearing it. Something sounding real is not the same thing as being real.

RMR: Most of the people in this program are in it because they have to write. They don’t have a choice. And I'm wondering for those people that like Oona, who has to write her poetry, Kenny, who has to write his novel, and I have to write my stuff, what advice do you have for people who are seeking art?

Well, if you're writing because you want to get rich, then I've got a bridge that you might want to buy. You do it because you love it. And sometimes it works out for us. But then, there's no other reason, and you won't make good work unless you.

I went to graduate school with some students who said, “Well, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to want to write a romance novel just to pay the bills.” I would ask, “Do you read romance novels? Do you like them?” And if either answer is No, then they'll never do it.

I cannot write a romance. If I did, then in ten pages, you'd know I was making fun of it, and I wouldn't be able to help that, and I wouldn't be trying to make fun of it. It's not my stuff, so you just have to be honest about what you want to make and be true to your vision and keep working and get it to where you want it.

You know what music is? Music is making the sounds that you want to hear, and people can say, I don't like that, but you can say, but that's exactly what I want to hear, and you've been successful. The same with writing, you're writing for yourself.

Oh, we do want to communicate the things we're doing. So we find ways to incorporate our communicative skills in there, but we can't do it. We can't, at the expense of the vision of our work.

We have to be honest and true to ourselves.

RMR: Thank you again, from all of us, for your generosity of time and wisdom. We could not be more thrilled to have you as part of the Storytellers’ Corner.

Oona Narváez is a Mexican American/Indigenous writer from El Paso, TX. After earning a BA in English American Literature, she is now pursuing an MFA in Poetry at IAIA.

Kenneth Dyer-Redner is a member of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. He received his BA from the University of Nevada, Reno and his MS in American Indian Studies from Arizona State University. He is a second-year MFA student in Creative Writing at IAIA. He lives in Southern California with his wife and kids.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.