“From national teacher strikes, to cacerolazo protests in Chile, to indigenous struggles against austerity and Amazon oil extraction in Ecuador, I can’t help but think that every movement for social change starts both with the inequitable material conditions that created it and also a narrative of how the past and future collide with the present. The novel, with all its vast interiority and universe-bending possibility, is vital to that.”
Michael Zapata’s fiction, which is formed from stories of exile and unstable realities, has been described in the New York Times as “hypnotizing” and in Axios as an important “part of the growing Latinofuturism movement.” He is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. He also currently serves on the boards of Stories Matter Foundation and MAKE Literary Productions. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.
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