501-918-3025
calsfoundation@cals.org
calsfoundation@cals.org
Marcela Fuentes Malas
About the author:
Marcela Fuentes is a Pushcart Prize–winning fiction writer and essayist. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was the 2016-2017 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, the Rumpus, Texas Highways Magazine, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. She was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas.
About the book:
The debut novel Malas follows one family living on the Texas-Mexico border and a curse that reverberates across generations. In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. Sure that Pilar stole her husband, she lays a curse on Pilar and her family. More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods and rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother dies, Lulu finds herself drawn into an unexpected kinship with the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town. As the quinceañera looms, one woman must make peace with the past as one girl pushes to embrace her future.
Photo by Paula N. Luu.