Francisco Cantú is a writer of essay, memoir, and literary criticism as well as a translator of Spanish to English prose. His first book, The Line Becomes a River, was the winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, an Art for Justice fellowship, and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano Literature.
His writing and translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review, Granta, Guernica, n+1, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. His work has also been widely anthologized, including in Best American Essays, The Selena Reader, Nepantla Familias, The Nature of Desert Nature, and Shadows of Reality (a catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s photographic materials).
A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson, where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and a co-coordinator of the Field Studies in Writing Program and the DETAINED archive.
At MacDowell, Cantú, made significant progress on his second book, an as-yet untitled novel centered around the internalization of American frontier mythology. In support of this book, Cantú has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Hemingway House in Idaho.
Portrait by David Taylor
