This first-ever collection of short mystery fiction by Latino
authors features an intriguing and unpredictable cast of sleuths,
murderers, and
crime victims. Reflecting the authors’—and society’s—preoccupation with
identity, self, and territory, the stories run the gamut of the mystery
genre, from traditional to noir, from the private investigator to the
police procedural, and even a “chick lit” mystery.
Edited by Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez, with a foreword by Ralph E. Rodriguez Ph.D., author of Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (University of Texas Press, 2005), Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery has been praised by The El Paso Times as a collection that will "engross, entertain and fully satisfy any lover of mystery fiction."
Several of the writers will share and expand on their stories of murder and mayhem with fans from coast to coast as follows:
Friday, May 8, 2009 – 6:30 PM
Murder By The Book
2342 Bissonnet
Houston, TX 77005
Contact: David Thompson, bustedflushpress@yahoo.com, 713-524-8597
Meet authors Sarah Cortez, Lucha Corpi, Bertha Jacobson, and Arthur Muñoz
Thursday May 14, 2009 – 6:00 - 8:00 PM
East Harlem Cafe
1651 Lexington Ave (@ 104th St.)
New York, NY 10029
Contact: Aurora Anaya-Cerda at La Casa Azul Bookstore, lacasaazulbookstore@gmail.com
Meet authors Carlos Hernandez, Liz Martinez, Richie Narvaez and Sergio Troncoso
Saturday, May 16, 2009 – 3:00 PM
The Mystery Bookstore
1036-C Broxton Ave
Los Angeles, CA, 90024
Contact: Bobby, contact@mystery-bookstore.com, 800-821-9017
Meet authors L.M. (Linda) Quinn and S. Ramos O’Briant
Thursday, May 21, 2009 – 7:30 PM
Tattered Cover
2526 East Colfax Avenue
Denver, CO 80206
Contact: Charles Stillwagon, charles.stillwagon@tatteredcover.com, 303-436-9219 ext. 2736
Meet authors Mario Acevedo and Manuel Ramos
Thursday, May 21, 2009 – 6:30 - 8 PM
Mysterious Book Shop
58 Warren St
New York, NY 10007
Contact: Ian Kern, ian@mysteriousbookshop.com, 212-587-1011
Meet authors Sarah Cortez, Carlos Hernandez, Liz Martinez, Richie Narvaez and Sergio Troncoso
Thursday, May 21, 2009 – 5 PM
The Twig Book Shop
5005 Broadway
San Antonio, TX 78209
Contact: Dinah, Dinah.thetwig@yahoo.com, 210-826-6411
Meet authors Bertha Jacobson and Arthur Muñoz
Saturday, May 30, 2009 – 3:30 - 4:30 PM
BookExpo America, New York, NY
Javits Convention Center, Author Autographing Area, Table 1
Meet authors Carlos Hernandez, Liz Martínez, Richie Narvaez and Sergio Troncoso
Hit List Contributors:
Mario Acevedo
Mario
Acevedo will never be known as a quick study in this writing biz. One day he
sat down to write a book, and six manuscripts and seventeen short years later,
he finally wrote a story that got the attention of a literary agent. That led
to a three-book contract with HarperCollins, which has been renewed for another
two books. Mario started to write serious literature and instead found success
writing about Felix Gomez, Iraq war veteran and vampire detective. His first
book, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats,
was published in 2006, followed by X-Rated Bloodsuckers in 2007. The Undead Kama Sutra was just released. Mario is a former army helicopter
pilot, paratrooper, engineer and art teacher to incarcerated felons. He lives
and writes in Denver, Colorado.
His
Latino heritage, besides the fact that he likes to drink Carta Blanca and eat
jalapeños: His dad’s side of the family had their property taken by Pancho
Villa; his mom’s side were the ones who helped take it. He was born in El Paso,
Texas, and grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Lucha Corpi
Poet
and writer Lucha Corpi was born in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, and came to
Berkeley, California, as a young wife in 1964. Corpi has a degree in
comparative literature from U.C. Berkeley, where she served as a student member
of the newly established Chicano Studies’ Executive Committee. She is a
founding member of Aztlán Cultural, an arts service organization, and of Centro
Chicano de Escritores.
She
earned her master’s degree in world and comparative literature from San
Francisco State University. Primarily known as a Spanish-language poet, she is
also the author of five English-language novels, four of which are mysteries
featuring Brown Angel Investigations and Gloria Damasco, the first Chicana
detective in American literature. Her novels include Delia’s Song; Eulogy for a Brown Angel, which received the 1992 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles
Award and the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange award for best fiction; Cactus Blood; Black Widow’s Wardrobe; and Crimson Moon.
Her
poetry is collected in Variaciones sobre una tempestad / Variations on a Storm and Palabras de mediodía / Noon Words, with English translations by Catherine Rodríguez Nieto. She has also authored the children’s books Where Fireflies Dance / Ahí, Dónde Bailan Las Luciérnagas and The Triple Banana Split Boy / El niño goloso.
Lucha
lives in Oakland, California, where she was a tenured teacher in the Oakland
Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for thirty years.
Sarah Cortez
The
poetry of Sarah Cortez (How To Undress A Cop, Arte Público, 2000) brings the world of street policing
to the reader in a way that poet-reviewer Ed Hirsch describes as “nervy,
quick-hitting, street-smart, sexual.” Winner of the 1999 PEN Texas Literary
award in poetry and other juried designations, Sarah is much in demand as a
creative writing teacher and visiting poet. She was awarded two consecutive
one-year appointments as a visiting scholar at the University of Houston’s
Center for Mexican American Studies. One of her poems was chosen for the nationwide
Poetry In Motion program, and many others have been anthologized both in the
United States and in Europe. One of her poems was recently awarded Honorable
Mention in the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008.
Sarah
has been named a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has
edited Urban-Speak: Poetry of the City (University of Houston, Center for Mexican American Studies, 2001) and Windows into My World: Latino Youth Write Their Lives (Arte Público, 2007), an anthology of short memoir essays written by young men and women across the United States, reflecting the diversity of growing up Latino. She and Liz Martínez are also coeditors of the forthcoming anthology Indian Country Noir from Akashic Books. Sarah has been a police officer in the state of Texas since 1993.
Carolina García-Aguilera
Cuban-born
Carolina García-Aguilera is the author of eight books and a contributor to many
anthologies (among them: Mystery in the Sunshine State, Mystery Street, Miami Noir, Havana Noir), but she is perhaps best
known for the first six, a series featuring Lupe Solano, a Cuban-American
private investigator who lives and works in Miami. Her books have been
translated into twelve languages and optioned out for film and television.
Carolina, a private investigator herself, has been the recipient of many
awards, including the Shamus and the Flamingo.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a writer/scholar/activist who uses
prose, poetry and theory for social change. She serves as the chair of the
César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA and is also a
professor in that department. She has published eight books, including the
novels Sor Juana’s Second Dream (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), which was awarded Best Historical Fiction by the Latino Literary Hall of Fame; Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (Arte Público Press, 2005), which was the recipient of both the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Lesbian Mystery Novel and the Latino Book Award for Best English-Language Mystery; and Calligraphy of the Witch (St. Martin’s Press 2007). Alicia was also the recipient of a Ford-Pellicer Border Literature Award in 1998 and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award in Poetry in 1989.
On the academic side, Alicia has published Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (University of Texas Press, 1998), and the edited volume Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (Palgrave, 2003). Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German and Italian.
Alicia was born in El Paso, Texas, and has lived in Iowa
City, Boston, Albuquerque and Santa Barbara. She currently resides in West Los
Angeles.
Carlos Hernandez
Carlos Hernandez is a writer and educator living in New
York. He cowrote the novel Abecedarium (with Davis Schneiderman), wrote the novella The Last Generation to Die and to date has penned seventeen short stories that have found homes in journals and magazines including Happy, Interzone, Fiction International and Cosmopsis.
He was born in the greater Chicago area in 1971 to Osmundo
and Emma Hernandez, both recent emigrants to the United States who left Cuba to
wait out the Castro regime. In 2000, Carlos earned a Ph.D. in English with an
emphasis in creative writing from Binghamton University. He teaches
composition, literature and creative writing at the Borough of Manhattan
Community College, part of the City University of New York and could not be
prouder to serve as a steward of accessible public education.
He wishes to assure readers of this anthology that, while
mamey seeds do contain cyanide, there is virtually no risk of being poisoned by
accident. Purposeful poisoning is another matter entirely.
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, a native of Mercedes, Texas, is the
Ellen Clayton Garwood professor at the University of Texas. Parts of his Klail
City Death Trip series have been translated into Dutch, French, German and
Italian. Theses on his works have been written in this country and in Germany,
Netherlands, Italy, Sicily, Spain and Sweden. Aside from numerous presentations
in the United States and Europe, he has also read in Cuba, Iraq, Mexico and
Panama, and has judged manuscripts for the National Endowment for the Arts and
the National Endowment for the Humanities. He holds a Doctor of Letters from
Texas A&M University.
Bertha Jacobson
Bertha Jacobson is a federally licensed court interpreter
who lives in San Antonio, Texas. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Bertha moved to the
United States after graduating from high school and attended the University of
Texas at El Paso, where she received her BSEE and MSE degrees. She then moved
to Dallas and spent fifteen years working as a software engineer, while
nurturing her interest for the written word both in English and Spanish.
Currently, she is a freelance court interpreter and
translator at work on her first novel. She graduated from the Institute of
Children’s Literature in West Redding, Connecticut, and is an active member
of the Society of Latino and Hispanic Writers of San Antonio. Her Spanish-language short story, “Las babuchas de su santidad,” was published in the UTSA literary magazine, Labra Palabra.
John Lantigua
John
Lantigua was born in New York City. His mother was from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and
his father from Matanzas, Cuba. He has published six novels, including Heat Lightning, which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. His last three books, Player’s Vendetta, The Ultimate Havana and The Lady from Buenos Aires, all feature Miami-based Cuban-American private
eye Willie Cuesta. Several of his novels have been optioned by film companies.
His short story “The Jungle” was a finalist for a Shamus Award from the Private
Eye Writers of America.
John
has also won various journalism prizes, including the Robert F. Kennedy
Journalism Award, the World Hunger Year Harry Chapin Media Award and the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists Award for Investigative Reporting.
He has lived in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Thailand, and has reported from
numerous other Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Cuba,
Colombia, Argentina and Venezuela. He currently lives in Miami Beach, Florida.
Liz Martínez
As
a child, Liz Martínez lived with her parents in her father’s hometown: Mexico
City. Her father was a mobster, and her mother was a secretary. After escaping
a later suburban existence in Northern Virginia, she returned to her
birthplace, New York City, where she earned her undergraduate degree from John
Jay College of Criminal Justice. She went on to get a master’s
degree in
writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University.
Her
short stories have appeared in the anthologies Manhattan Noir, Queens Noir and Cop Tales 2000, and in publications including COMBAT: The Literary Expression of Battlefield Touchstones and Police Officer’s Quarterly. Her short story “Kris Kringle” was Orchard Press Mystery’s Christmas 2000 feature. She is also the author of the non-fiction book The Retail Manager’s Guide to Crime and Loss Prevention, and her articles about security and law enforcement have appeared in publications around the world. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and the Public Safety Writers Association.
Liz is at work on a young adult mystery and an adult mystery. She and Sarah Cortez are also coeditors of the forthcoming anthology Indian Country Noir from Akashic Books. She is currently employed as a New York state investigator.
Arthur Muñoz
Arthur Muñoz was born in Los Angeles in 1924. As a teen, he
lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, and later, in Colorado Springs, Albuquerque and
San Diego. Weeks after Pearl Harbor, he joined the Marine Corps and saw action
in the South Pacific during World War II. He returned to the Marine Corps
during the Korean war as an infantry instructor at Camp Pendleton in San Diego.
He was interviewed for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The War.
Art attended Texas A&M in Kingsville, where he was
given a poetry scholarship by the Nueces County PEN organization. He has had
two books of poetry published: In Loneliness (Naylor Company, 1975) and From a Cop’s Journal (Corona Publishing Company, 1984). His articles
and poems have also been published in magazines and the San Antonio
Express-News newspaper. He
recently won third place in a poetry contest sponsored by the San Antonio
Museum of Art.
Art retired as a homicide detective from the San Antonio
Police Department. He has also worked as a fraud investigator for the state of
Texas and was chief of the San Antonio City Transportation Department. In
addition, he taught poetry for two years in the gifted and talented classes for
the San Antonio Independent School District.
R. Narvaez
Nuyorican writer, blogger, podcaster and performer R.
Narvaez was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His mother came from
Ponce, Puerto Rico; his father from Naranjito. Narvaez received his master’s
degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and later attended
the Humber School for Writers on a scholarship. He has taught at the high
school and college levels and worked in magazine publishing and advertising.
His literary and crime fiction have been published in Mississippi Review, Murdaland, ñ, Pocho, 11211, Street Magazine and Thrilling Detective, among others. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently working on a novel.
L. M. Quinn
L. M. Quinn lives in Los Angeles and works as a technical
writer for the business end of Warner Bros. Una ensalada mixta (mitad mexicana, mitad rusa), she was born in Michigan, but raised in Los Angeles (¡Gracias a Dios!). She is also actively engaged in writing mysteries, short stories and book reviews, and has been published in Travel 50 & Beyond and ELLE Magazines. She has written two unpublished mystery novels, Out with a Bang and Deadly Recollections.
Manuel Ramos
Manuel Ramos is a lawyer and former professor of Chicano
literature and a past winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Chicano/Latino Literary Award. He is the author of six crime fiction novels,
five of which feature Chicano lawyer Luis Móntez. The Móntez series debuted in
1993 with The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, which was nominated for an Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America. His published works include the noir private eye novel, Moony’s Road to Hell. His other publications consist of several short stories in various genres, poems, nonfiction articles and legal handbooks.
Manuel is a Chicano, born and raised in Florence, Colorado,
and is a current resident of Denver, where he is the director of advocacy for
Colorado Legal Services, the statewide legal aid program.
S. Ramos O’Briant
S. Ramos O’Briant was born and grew up in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Whistling Shade, La Herencia, AIM
Magazine, Ink Pot, NFG, The Copperfield Review, The Journal of Modern Post
and Café Irreal. In
addition, her short stories have been anthologized in Best Lesbian Love Stories of 2004, Latinos in Lotus Land: An
Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual
Press, 2008) and What Wildness Is
This (University of Texas Press, 2007). Her book reviews have been
published on La Bloga and Moorishgirl.
A. E. Roman
A. E. Roman (Alex Echevarria Roman) is the author of Chinatown Angel, the first book in
the Chico Santana mystery series, coming soon from Thomas Dunne Books/St.
Martin’s Press Minotaur. He’s also a co-author (with Emily Adler) of Sweet 15, to be published by
Marshall Cavendish.
He has read his poetry at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, the
Cooper Hewitt Museum and the John Coltrane Society, among other venues. His
poems have been published in Howard University’s Amistad
(of and about Black art and literature), The
Orange Room and A Gathering
of the Tribes magazines.
He was born in New York City and raised in the South Bronx.
His parents (both of mixed African and Spanish ancestry) are originally from
Isabela, Puerto Rico. He has traveled through much of the United States and
Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Italy, France and
Spain, but he still lives and works in his beloved New York.
Steven Torres
Steven Torres was born and raised in the Bronx, but lived
in Puerto Rico with his parents for over a year in the 1980s. He is the author
of the Precinct Puerto Rico series for St. Martin’s Press. The Concrete Maze, his latest
novel, is set on some of the meaner streets of 1992 New York. His Bronx-set
short story, “Early Fall,” can be found in the anthology Bronx Noir. He now lives and
teaches in central Connecticut.
Sergio Troncoso
Sergio Troncoso, the son of Mexican immigrants, was born in
El Paso, Texas, and now lives in New York City. After graduating from Harvard
College, he was a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico and studied international
relations and philosophy at Yale University.
Troncoso’s stories have been featured in many anthologies,
including The Norton Anthology of
Latino Literature (W. W. Norton), Latino
Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (Pearson/Longman
Publishing), Once Upon a Cuento
(Curbstone Press), Hecho en Tejas:
An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature (University of New Mexico
Press), City Wilds: Essays and
Stories about Urban Nature (University of Georgia Press) and New World: Young Latino Writers
(Dell Publishing). His work has also appeared in Encyclopedia
Latina, Newsday, El Paso Times, Pembroke Magazine, Hadassah Magazine, Other
Voices and many other publications.
In 1999, his book of short stories, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (University of
Arizona Press), won the Premio Aztlán for the best book by a new Chicano writer
and the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association. His
novel, The Nature of Truth
(Northwestern University Press), was published in 2003 and explores
righteousness and evil, Yale and the Holocaust.
