As a writer (they/them/he), my work in fiction, drama, and journalism has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Columbia Journalism Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Medium.com, Electric Literature, Thriller Magazine, Yes! Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, Huffington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, Electronic Intifada, Food Not Bombs/Tucson Food Share radical zine (summer 2020), Break the Wall Theatre Project, and elsewhere. My next nonfiction book, Making the New “Illegal”: How Decades of US Involvement in Central America Triggered the Modern Wave of Immigration, has a forward written by linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky.
I was bestowed a "Change Maker" award by the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice (under chairperson and resident anarchist Noam Chomsky) at the University of Arizona, where I've been a visiting scholar since 2018, awarded to produce Into the Sun, a sci-fi "climate fantasy" graphic novel about borders and climate breakdown. See "Publications' and "Current Work" on this website for more details.
In Dec. 2019, The Robert B. Silvers Foundation, established by the late co-founder of The New York Review of Books, awarded me its inaugural Work in Progress grant for an ongoing journalism investigation sponsored by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In 2020, I crossed over to screenwriting where some of the biggest Hollywood contests -- The International PAGE Awards, Screencraft, and The Script Lab -- each ranked my debut script about an anti-Nazi resistance fighter, in their quarter finals categories, beating out some 24,000+ scripts entered, cumulatively. The Sundance Film Institute, meanwhile, scored a feature script that I and a co-author to advance to final consideration (out of 4000 scripts entered) for their esteemed 2021 Screenwriters Lab that cultivated such scripts as Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You," Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station," and many others.
I am a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists (NLGJA), and Study Hall, a magnificent resource for freelance journalists.
My mother was born in Navajoa, Sonora (Mexico) and migrated as a child with my nana (grandmother) to Southern Arizona where I was eventually born in the gorgeous Sonoran desert city of Tucson. Add to that a father born in Italy, and I grew up with borders and colonization in my blood, home, and public life. Toward a no-borders world!
