Maceo Montoya’s latest release, Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century Latinx Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), co-authored with poet Javier O. Huerta, has won an American Book Award. Professor Montoya is a writer and visual artist teaching in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies, the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program, all in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. We're hoping to read more fiction this summer, so our July selections include novels from faculty in the Department of English and Department of Chicana/o/x Studies as well as graduates of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, contemporary Latinx writers have established themselves within an evolving literary tradition. Imaginative Possibilities collects interviews with some of these authors to explores the writers’ processes, aesthetics, creative trajectories, and places within the larger body of Latinx literature.
Malaquías Montoya, a professor emeritus of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Davis, has influenced several generations of students. His art has addressed social and political issues: farmworkers rights, the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America, and the torture of prisoners by many governments. Montoya's art was recently celebrated at exhibitions in Davis and the Bay Area.
Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces (University of Nevada Press, April 2021) by Maceo Montoya is a satirical novel about a Mexican American artist's struggle to create great works. His plans include a move to Paris to join the ranks of his artistic hero, Gustave Courbet — except it’s 1943 and he’s stuck in the backwoods of New Mexico. Penniless and prone to epileptic fits, even his mother thinks he’s crazy.
You Must Fight Them (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) is a novella by Maceo Montoya. In it, a short, bookish half-Mexican doctoral student returns to his hometown of Woodland, California and tries to reconnect with Lupita Valdez, the girl he worshipped in high school. First he must come to terms with her three hulking brothers and his own identity.
