Carla Mari Trujillo

Carla Trujillo was born in New Mexico and received a BS in Human Development at U.C. Davis and a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She studied writing with Sandra Cisneros, Paul Cohen, Thaisa Frank, Cherrie Moraga, and Junot Diaz. Carla's new novel, Faith and Fat Chances (Curbstone Books and Northwestern University Press, Sept, 2015), is a Finalist for the PEN-Bellwether Prized for Socially Engaged Fiction. The novel is loosely based on the challenges faced by her New Mexican family as they contended with eminent domain and the effects of nuclear testing. Carla's first novel, What Night Brings (Curbstone Press, 2003), received the Miguel Mármol Prize for best first work of fiction by a Latino/a writer, the Latino Book Award for fiction, and the Paterson Fiction Prize. It was a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year, and was an honorable mention for the Gustavas Myers Book Award. What Night Brings was one of three finalists for the University of Washington's "common book" for 2009. The novel is a "Working Classic" and still in print. Carla is also the editor of Living Chicana Theory (1998) and Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Out/Write Vanguard Award. The anthologies and the novel are widely used in college and high school classrooms. Carla has also written various articles on identity and higher education. She is a founding member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. In addition to Macondo, she has taught at Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writers Retreat, U.C. Berkeley, Mills College, and San Francisco State University. Carla lives in Berkeley, California.