August 28, 2001
Contact: Roman Baratiak
(805) 893-2078
e-mail: baratiak-r@sa.ucsb.edu
Dagoberto Gilb reads his award-winning fiction at UCSB
Summary Facts:
- Dagoberto Gilb
- Writer’s reading
- PEN/Hemingway Award winner for collection, The Magic of Blood
- Author of Woodcuts of Women and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
- Monday, October 1
- 4 pm / UCSB Corwin Pavilion
- Free event
- For information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Acclaimed by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx (The Shipping News) as “an important voice in American fiction,” author Dagoberto Gilb will read from his work on Monday, October 1 at 4 pm in UCSB Corwin Pavilion. This is a free event. Gilb’s first collection of short stories, The Magic of Blood (Grove Press, 1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction offers a keen-eyed and sympathetic look at the lives of working class Chicanos in the Southwestern United States. His latest collection, Woodcuts of Women (Grove Press, 2000) has been hailed by fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips (Machine Dreams, MotherKind) as “completely contemporary, absolutely convincing, and nakedly real.”
Gilb currently teaches creative writing at Southwest State University in San Marcos, Texas. His work has been published in Harper’s, Poets and Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Threepenny Review and The New York Times. In addition to the PEN/Hemingway Award, he has won a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Writer’s Award for fiction.
Gilb grew up in Los Angeles, and transferred to UCSB after three years at a junior college. At UCSB he earned a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and a Master’s in religion. Moving to El Paso after finishing his education, he took on a series of odd jobs, including a stint as a bouncer in a biker bar and twelve years as a union carpenter. During this time he began writing, refusing Raymond Carver’s offer to help him enter the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop after Carver was impressed by some of his short stories. Gilb remained persistent, sending out one story, “Look on the Bright Side,” 125 times before it was published. In 1985 he published his first collection, the now out-of-print Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press). The award-winning The Magic of Blood followed in 1993. His first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (GrovePress, 1994), told the tale of unlucky lives in the El Paso YMCA, another tough-edged look at the borderlands. Mickey Acuña was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times.
Before Gilb moved to Austin where he currently resides, poet and essayist Ray Gonzalez (Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood, Memory Fever), writing in The Nation, claimed: “Gilb, who lives in El Paso, has been as overlooked as fellow El Pasoan Cormac McCarthy once was...Gilb’s realism is the most lethal kind of fiction a Chicano can write. His stories of blue-collar workers are not just about the heartbreak of the working class but about the strength, madness and beauty its members possess as they hurtle through an existence too many people do not understand.”
Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures with the Department of Chicano Studies and the College of Creative Studies. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Dagoberto Gilb will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2078.