Critical Storytelling from the Borderlands

From this set of critical stories emerges a timely confession from marginalized imagined communities at the physical and metaphorical Mexican-American border. These hybrid storytellers create a multivalence of experiences and genres. Composers of this ground-breaking collection draw readers into an affective connection with the borderlands, offering critical examinations of legal status, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, family, and health. Additionally, creative representations across genres explore notions of geography, vulnerability, suffering, trauma, pain as well as joy, healing, and love. By posing questions about loss of innocence, they incite new literary and visual spaces for fusing together fragments of the remains of land, body, and/or being, all the while creating a site of fresh confessions where critical stories are illuminated collages assembled together from within la línea.Contributors are: Kiri Avelar, Irving Ayala, Carmella J. Braniger, Roxana Fragoso Carrillo, Marisa V. Cervantes, Guadalupe Chavez, Julio Enríquez-Ornelas, Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Verónica Gaona, Andrea Gómez, Filiberto Mares Hernández, Víctor M. Macías-González, Carol Mariano, Ana Silvia Monzón Monterroso, Juana Moriel-Payne, Rachel Neff, Jumko Ogata-Aguilar, José Olivarez, Isabela Ortega, Paul Pedroza, Jorge Omar Ramírez Pimienta, Raphaella Prange, Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla, Erica Reyes, Fidel García Reyes, Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana and Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez.

Carmella J. Braniger, Ph.D. (2003), Oklahoma State University, is Professor of English at Millikin University. She has published poems, chapbooks, and critical stories, and edited four volumes of Critical Storytelling since 2017.Julio Enríquez-Ornelas, Ph.D. (2014), University of California, is an Associate Professor at Millikin University. His work on Latin American and Latinx Studies appears in Prose Studies, Hispania, Journal of the MMLA, Textos Híbridos, Alchemy: Journal of Translation, El BeisMan, and Suburbano.