A.J. Rodriguez is a Chicano writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Oregon’s M.F.A. program, where he was the recipient of the Logsdon Fiction Award.
His stories have won the CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, and placed as a finalist for the Robert Day Award for Fiction, the Story Foundation Prize, and The Sewanee Review Fiction Contest. His fiction has also appeared in New Ohio Review, Fractured Lit, and Passages North.
While at MacDowell, Rodriguez completed edits on his debut book of fiction, a novel-in-stories about a biracial Chicano coming of age in Albuquerque's "War Zone" barrio. Stories from this manuscript have won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, Second Place in Salamander's Short Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades, judged by Jonathan Escoffery. Additionally, he embarked on writing a new novel, a multi-perspective narrative revolving around two Chicano boxers and the effects suppressed queerness, family trauma, and mental illness have had on their cultural legacy.
