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Faculty and Staff

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera-Garza

Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair

Director, Ph.D. Program in Creative writing in Spanish

Department of  Hispanic studies

University of Houston

Office: 434AH
Email: criverag@central.uh.edu
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 Cristina Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. A writer, historian, critic, and scholar, Rivera Garza is one of the most influential voices in contemporary Mexican and Latin American literature. Her work moves across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, literary criticism, archival research, and experimental writing, consistently expanding the possibilities of literary form in Spanish and English.

Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, the English-language version of El invencible verano de Liliana. The book won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography and was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Written from family archives, letters, notebooks, institutional documents, and personal memory, Liliana’s Invincible Summer reconstructs the life of her sister Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered in Mexico City in 1990. The book has become a major contribution to contemporary conversations about gender violence, justice, mourning, and the political force of memory.

Her extensive body of work includes the novels Nadie me verá llorar / No One Will See Me Cry, La cresta de Ilión / The Iliac Crest, Lo anterior, Verde Shanghai, and La muerte me da; the short fiction collections Ningún reloj cuenta esto, La frontera más distante, and New and Selected Stories; the hybrid works Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué, Autobiografía del algodón / Autobiography of Cotton, and Terrestre / Terrestrial (Fall 2026); as well as essay collections and critical works such as Los muertos indóciles: Necroescrituras y desapropiación / The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation, Dolerse: Textos desde un país herido / Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, and Escrituras geológicas. Her books have been translated into English and other languages, and her work has circulated widely in Mexico, the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

Rivera Garza’s writing is recognized for its formal experimentation, its attention to collective and nonauthorial practices of writing, and its sustained engagement with archives, bodies, language, violence, illness, migration, borderlands, labor, and memory. Across her literary and scholarly production, she has developed some of the most original reflections on writing and dispossession in contemporary literature, including the concepts of necroescrituras and desapropiación. Her work often challenges the limits between genres, approaching the archive as a living field of relation, a site of grief, and a space where erased or silenced histories can be reactivated.

Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, the Anna Seghers Prize, the Roger Caillois Award, the José Rubén Romero National Novel Prize, the Juan Vicente Melo National Short Story Prize, and other major national and international recognitions.

Rivera Garza earned a B.A. in Sociology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Houston. Before joining the University of Houston faculty in 2016, she held academic appointments at San Diego State University, the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, and the University of California, San Diego.

At the University of Houston, Rivera Garza founded and directs the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing in Spanish, a landmark program dedicated to literary creation, critical inquiry, and the development of Spanish-language writing in the United States. Her teaching and mentorship bring together creative practice, literary theory, archival research, translation, border studies, feminist thought, and community-based writing. Through her work as a writer, scholar, and program director, Rivera Garza has transformed the place of Spanish-language creative writing within U.S. higher education and has helped establish the University of Houston as a central space for contemporary Latin American, Latinx, and transnational literary production.

Selected Publications

No One Will See Me Cry (novel)

No One Will See Me Cry received the 1997 José Rubén Romero National Book Award, the 2000 IMPAC-CONARTE-ITESM Prize, and the 2001 International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award. This is a vividly imagined piece of documentary fiction by one of Mexico´s new literary stars. Joaquín Buitrago, a photographer in the Castañeda Insane Asylum, believes a patient, Matilda Burgos, is a prostitute he knew years earlier. His obsession leads him to explore the clinic´s records, and her tragic history. Joaquín and Matilda begin to tell each other fragmented stories about a past they almost shared, and a future in which they do not believe. Set in 1920´s Mexico, this novel is at once an overview of one of the most turbulent times in Mexican history, a love story, and a meditation on the ways in which medical and popular language defined insanity. No One Will See Me Cry  is a lyrical and startling visitation with the so-called losers of an era as they try to plumb the meaning of their lives.

About Rivera-Garza's Work

Carlos Fuentes on No One Will See Me Cry
One of the most notable works of fiction not only in Mexican literature but in the literature of the Spanish-speaking world at the start of the twentieth-first century ... In this novel of long dark skirts, Rivera Garza imagines, like no one else has done in Mexico since José Revueltas, the tragic options and the psychic turmoil caused by revolutionary theory and action. And she does it with such an intensity, with such a grandeur that, in conjunction with Matilda, the protagonist, we must, as readers, kneel ourselves when Diamantina dies, Cástulo gets lost, and Matilda prays for them ...--"El melodrama de la mujer caída", por Carlos Fuentes. El país.

Michael Davidson on poem "Tercer mundo"
I have taken my title from the work of Cristina Rivera-Garza, a Mexican poet, historian, and novelist who lives both in the United States and Mexico and whose research has been focused on mental health institutions. Her long poem, "Tercer mundo," addresses a key issue in globalization: the problem of representing systems of integration and amalgamation that, by definition, cannot be defined by mimetic criteria. As David Harvey asks in the epigraph to this chapter how is it possible to imagine geography "in an image other than that of capital in the future". Rivera Garza similarly asks what would it be like to see the third world from both a perspective before its invention in world-systems theory and outside of its ancillary relationship to a putatively develop world--when, to adopt a Heideggerian terminology, the world no longer "works" --"Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA,"; in On the Outskirts of Form. Practicing Cultural Poetics. Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

In English

  • "The Afterlife of Cotton: Through the Present and Past of a Border Town, in the Trail of Legendary Writer José Revueltas" High Country News, September 2016
  • Rivera-Garza´s Short Fiction and Poetry in English Translation "Autoethnography with the Other" trans. by Francisca González Arias. Literal Magazine.
  • "Network of Holes" trans. by Jen Hofer. World Literature Today.
  • "The Carpathian Mountain Woman" trans. by Alex Ross. Bomb Magazine.
  • "To Clear" trans. by José Antonio Villarán. Make Literary Productions #14.
  • "Third World" trad.by Jen Hofer. Introduced by Lynn Emanuel. Boston Review.
  • "Nostalgia," in Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. Ed. by Álvaro Uribe
  • "Third World," in Sin puertas visibles. An anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women. Ed. and trans. by Jen Hofer. 

Academic Articles

  • "'She neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone': Inmates and Psychiatrists Debate Gender and Class at the General Insane Asylum La Castaneda Mexico, 1910-1930". Hispanic American Historical Review, 2001.
  • "Dangerous Minds: Changing Views of the Mentally Ill in Porfirian Mexico, 1876-1911" Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2001.
  • "Beyond Medicalization: Asylum doctors and inmates produce sexual knowledge at the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda in late Porfirian Mexico" The Famous 41. Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 2003.
  • "Becoming Mad in Revolutionary Mexico: Mentally Ill Patients at the General Insane Asylum, Mexico 1910-1930" The Confinement of the Insane. International Perspectives, 1800-1965. Ed. by Roy Porter and David Wright. Cambridge, 2003.
  • "General Insane Asylum La Castañeda". Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America. Ed. by John M. Herrick and Paul H. Stuart. USA: Sage Publications, 2005. 

Rivera-Garza´s Translations
From Spanish into English:

  • "Nine Mexican Poets Edited by Cristina Rivera-Garza," in New American Writing #31. From English into Spanish:
  • Notas sobre conceptualismos (Mexico: Conaculta, 2013).
  • "Por la niebla del nosotros" translation and introduction of Juliana Sphar, in Nexos.
  • Translations of poems by Don Mee Choi, Edwin Torres, Juliana Sphar, Harryette Mullen, among others, included in Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación. 

Interviews

  • Interview with Michael Silverblatt for Bookworm, a nationally sindycated radio program focusing on books and literature. Broadcast on Los Angeles public radio station. KCRW
  • "Exchange: Meruane vs. Rivera-Garza." Traviesa magazine.
  • Interview in the magazine Belletrista, by Caitlin Fehir. 

About No One Will See Me Cry

  • Review in Belletriste magazine, by Caitlin Fehir.
  • Review in A striped Armchair.
  • Review by Paul Lappen. bookreview.com
  • Article by S. Silverstein, "Ragpickers of Modernity: Cristina Rivera Garza´s Nadie me verá llorar and Walter Benjamin´s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Estudios Hispánicos Glen Close, "Corpse Photography in Roberto Bolaño´s Estrella Distante and Cristina Rivera Garza´s Nadie me verá llorar", Bulletin of Spanish Studies 

In Spanish
Novel

  • Nadie me verá llorar (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, 1999). José Rubén Romero National Book Award, 1997; IMPAC-CONARTE-ITESM Award, 1999; International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award, 2001.
  • La cresta de Ilión (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002). Rómulo Gallegos Iberoamerican Award (2003) runner-up. (Il segreto, ed. Voland, 2010).
  • Lo anterior (Mexico: Tusquets, 2004).
  • La muerte me da (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, 2007), International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award, 2009.
  • Verde Shanghai (Mexico: Tusquets, 2011).
  • El mal de la taiga (Mexico: Tusquets, 2012).
  • Nadie me verá llorar (Mexico: Tusquets, 2014). 

Short Story Collections

  • La guerra no importa (Mexico: Mortiz, 1991). San Luis Potosí National Book Award, 1987.
  • Ningún reloj cuenta esto (Mexico: Tusquets, 2002). Juan Vicente Melo National Book Award, 2001.
  • La frontera más distante (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, 2008).
  • Allí te comerán las turicatas (Mexico: La Caja de Cerillos Ediciones/DGP, 2013). 

Poetry

  • La más mía (Mexico: Tierra Adentro, 1998).
  • Los textos del yo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005).
  • La muerte me da (Toluca: ITESM-Bonobos, 2007).
  • El disco de Newton, diez ensayos sobre el color (Mexico: Dirección de Literatura, UNAM, Bonobos, 2011).
  • Viriditas (Guadalajara: Mantis/UANL, 2011). 
  • La imaginación pública (CONCAULTA, 2015)

Non Fiction

  • La Castañeda. Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, 1910-1930 (Mexico: Tusquets, 2010).
  • Dolerse. Textos desde un país herido (Mexico: Sur+, 2011).
  • Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación (Mexico: Tusquets, 2013).

As Editor

  • Romper el hielo: Novísimas escrituras al pie de un volcán (Toluca: ITESM-Bonobos, 2006).
  • La novela según los novelistas (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007).
  • Romper el hielo: Novísimas escrituras al pie de un volcán. El lugar (re) visitado (México: Feria del Libro, Secretaría de Cultura, GDF, 2007).
  • Rigo es amor. Una rocola de dieciséis voces (Mexico: Tusquets, 2013).

About Her Work (Spanish)

  • Ningún crítico cuenta esto (Mexico: Ediciones Eón, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UC-Mexicanistas, 2010)
  • [http://www.stanford.edu/depts/span-port/cgi-fin/files/ Ni a tontas ni a locas: notas sobre Cristina Rivera Garza y su nuevo modo de narrar] (Stanford University), by Jorge Ruffinelli|.

Translations into Other Languages

  • No One Will See Me Cry (USA: Curbstone, 2003).
  • Ninguém me Verá Chorar (Brazil: Francis, 2005).
  • Nessuno mi vedra piangere (Italy: Voland, 2008).
  • Ninguém me Há de Ver Chorar (Portugal: Bertrand Editora, 2012).
  • Personne ve me verra pleurer (France: Phebus, 2013).