News

Patience and hard work = triumph for debut novelist Nadine Pinède (UT 2017). With her novel, When the Mapou Sings, due out this September from Penguin Random House, Haitian-American Nadine Pinède gives a fascinating advance look at her work in an inspiring piece on CNN.

Ivy Raff and I met in the poetry program at UTV in Tepoztlán this past January. We spoke again just as her debut poetry chapbook was released. I was surprised to find out that the poems in Rooted and Reduced to Dust were brewing for 20 years before they became a book.

Journalist Diego Courchay’s (UTV 2019) latest piece is a slow burn of a tribute to his father, who died earlier this year of Covid in the south of France, where he spent his last year.

Congratulations to Emily Raboteau (UTV 2023 alumna, non-fiction faculty 2019) on the publication of her much awaited new book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against the Apocalypse.

¡Doble Orgullo! Dos Volcanistas, Enrique Urbina (UTV 2020) y Montserrat Rodríguez Ruelas (UTV 2019), son ganadores de la prestigiosa beca FONCA 2023/24.

Congratulations to the multi-talented Anna Maconochie (UTV 2019, 2020 & 2021, fiction) on her gently surreal story of a marriage that takes the reader on a tour of the improbable. 

Tijuana-based writer Montserrat Rodríguez Ruelas, (UTV 2019, Beca La Güera Trigos), is touring Mexico with her first novel, Aunque es de noche, winner of the 2021 Amado Nervo National Short Novel Prize. A unique blend of reality and fantasy, the novel builds on short stories Montserrat brought to her master class in Tepoztlán with Alberto Chimal.

Melissa Watkins (UTV 2022, Writing with a Sense of Wonder), aka Mel the Bookworm, reads deep and wide, with a collector’s eye for work that feeds her passion for science fiction and fantasy. She doesn’t just read, she reviews. Prolifically. And she writes. Also prolifically.

You don’t get a review like this every day. According to Kirkus Review, Brittany Means (UTV, 2021), has written “a harrowing and soulful memoir to be read, savored, and reread.”