Hispanic Studies
  1. UH Home
  2. College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
  3. Hispanic Studies
  4. Faculty and Staff
  5. Cristina Rivera Garza

Faculty and Staff

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera-Garza

Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair

Director, Ph.D. Program in Creative writing in Spanish

Department of  Hispanic studies

University of Houston

Office: 434AH
Email: criverag@central.uh.edu
Download CV

 Cristina Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. A writer, historian, critic, and scholar, Rivera Garza is one of the most influential voices in contemporary Mexican and Latin American literature. Her work moves across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, literary criticism, archival research, and experimental writing, consistently expanding the possibilities of literary form in Spanish and English.

Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, the English-language version of El invencible verano de Liliana. The book won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography and was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Written from family archives, letters, notebooks, institutional documents, and personal memory, Liliana’s Invincible Summer reconstructs the life of her sister Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered in Mexico City in 1990. The book has become a major contribution to contemporary conversations about gender violence, justice, mourning, and the political force of memory.

Her extensive body of work includes the novels Nadie me verá llorar / No One Will See Me Cry, La cresta de Ilión / The Iliac Crest, Lo anterior, Verde Shanghai, and La muerte me da; the short fiction collections Ningún reloj cuenta esto, La frontera más distante, and New and Selected Stories; the hybrid works Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué, Autobiografía del algodón / Autobiography of Cotton, and Terrestre / Terrestrial (Fall 2026); as well as essay collections and critical works such as Los muertos indóciles: Necroescrituras y desapropiación / The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation, Dolerse: Textos desde un país herido / Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, and Escrituras geológicas. Her books have been translated into English and other languages, and her work has circulated widely in Mexico, the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

Rivera Garza’s writing is recognized for its formal experimentation, its attention to collective and nonauthorial practices of writing, and its sustained engagement with archives, bodies, language, violence, illness, migration, borderlands, labor, and memory. Across her literary and scholarly production, she has developed some of the most original reflections on writing and dispossession in contemporary literature, including the concepts of necroescrituras and desapropiación. Her work often challenges the limits between genres, approaching the archive as a living field of relation, a site of grief, and a space where erased or silenced histories can be reactivated.

Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, the Anna Seghers Prize, the Roger Caillois Award, the José Rubén Romero National Novel Prize, the Juan Vicente Melo National Short Story Prize, and other major national and international recognitions.

Rivera Garza earned a B.A. in Sociology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Houston. Before joining the University of Houston faculty in 2016, she held academic appointments at San Diego State University, the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, and the University of California, San Diego.

At the University of Houston, Rivera Garza founded and directs the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing in Spanish, a landmark program dedicated to literary creation, critical inquiry, and the development of Spanish-language writing in the United States. Her teaching and mentorship bring together creative practice, literary theory, archival research, translation, border studies, feminist thought, and community-based writing. Through her work as a writer, scholar, and program director, Rivera Garza has transformed the place of Spanish-language creative writing within U.S. higher education and has helped establish the University of Houston as a central space for contemporary Latin American, Latinx, and transnational literary production.

Selected Publications

Books in English

  • Rivera Garza, Cristina. Terrestrial. Translated by Christina MacSweeney, Hogarth, forthcoming Sept. 2026.
  •  Autobiography of Cotton. Translated by Christina MacSweeney, Graywolf Press, 2026.
  •  Death Takes Me. Translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, Hogarth, 2025.
  •  Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice. Hogarth, 2023. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography; finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction.
  •  New and Selected Stories. Translated by Sarah Booker, Lisa Dillman, Francisca González Arias, and Alex Ross, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2022.
  •  The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Translated by Robin Myers, Vanderbilt University Press, 2020.
  •  Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country. Translated by Sarah Booker, The Feminist Press, 2020.
  •  The Taiga Syndrome. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2018.
  •  The Iliac Crest. Translated by Sarah Booker, The Feminist Press, 2017.
  •  No One Will See Me Cry. Translated by Andrew Hurley, Curbstone Press, 2003.


Books in Spanish

  • Rivera Garza, Cristina. Terrestre. Literatura Random House, 2025.
  • Me llamo cuerpo que no está: Poesía completa. Lumen, 2024.
  • El invencible verano de Liliana. Literatura Random House, 2021. Premio Xavier Villaurrutia 2021; Premio Mazatlán de Literatura 2022; Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography 2024 for the English-language edition.
  • Autobiografía del algodón. Literatura Random House, 2020.
  • Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué. Random House, 2016.
  • La imaginación pública. Conaculta, 2015.
  • Los muertos indóciles: Necroescrituras y desapropiación. Tusquets, 2013.
  • Dolerse: Textos desde un país herido. Sur+, 2011.
  • La Castañeda: Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, 1910–1930. Tusquets, 2010.
  • La muerte me da. Tusquets, 2007. Winner of the 2009 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.
  • Nadie me verá llorar. Tusquets, 1999. Winner of the 1997 José Rubén Romero National Novel Prize, the 2000 IMPAC-CONARTE-ITESM Prize, and the 2001 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.


Selected Academic and Critical Work by Rivera Garza

  • Rivera Garza, Cristina. Escrituras geológicas. Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2022.
  • “Geological Writings.” Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018, edited by Mónica Szurmuk and Debra A. Castillo, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
  • The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Translated by Robin Myers, Vanderbilt University Press, 2020.
  • Los muertos indóciles: Necroescrituras y desapropiación. Tusquets, 2013.
  • La Castañeda: Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, 1910–1930. Tusquets, 2010.
  • “She neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone: Inmates and Psychiatrists Debate Gender and Class at the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda, Mexico, 1910–1930.” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 3–4, 2001, pp. 653–688.
  • “Dangerous Minds: Changing Views of the Mentally Ill in Porfirian Mexico, 1876–1911.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 56, no. 1, 2001, pp. 36–67.


Selected Recent Scholarship on Rivera Garza’s Work

  • Draper, Susana. “Tomas de palabra para re-significar la justicia: Leer El invencible verano de Liliana de Cristina Rivera Garza al calor de las luchas feministas.” A Contracorriente: Una Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, vol. 22, no. 2, 2025, pp. 99–123.
  • Ventura Páez, Maria Laura. “El invencible verano de Liliana: Presas, depredadores y hematomas invisibles.” Revista Internacional de Culturas y Literaturas, no. 28, 2025.
  • Estrada Orozco, Luis Miguel. “Montaje y zozobra en Autobiografía del algodón y El invencible verano de Liliana, de Cristina Rivera Garza.” Signos Literarios, vol. 21, no. 42, 2025.
  • Del Castillo Rodríguez, Carlos Manuel. “Devenir tierra desde Estación Camarón en Autobiografía del algodón, de Cristina Rivera Garza.” Revista Sarance, no. 52, 2024.
  • Lindsay, Claire. “‘Queer Errantry’ in the Work of Cristina Rivera Garza.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, vol. 33, no. 3, 2024, pp. 425–441.
  • Boccuti, Anna. “‘Al lenguaje de la justicia’: Una conversación con Cristina Rivera Garza sobre El invencible verano de Liliana.” Altre Modernità, no. 34, 2025.


Selected Recent Reviews and Critical Commentary

  • Short critical excerpts may be used selectively on the page. They are formatted here as attributed quotations rather than as a full press kit.
  • The Pulitzer Prize described Liliana’s Invincible Summer as a “genre-bending account” that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism, and poetic biography.
  • Katie Kitamura, writing on Death Takes Me for The New York Times, called the novel a “harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.”
  • Sandra Cisneros wrote that Liliana’s Invincible Summer is “a blueprint of one woman’s murder” and “the story of hundreds of thousands of women.”
  • Francisco Cantú described Rivera Garza as “an oracle of the in-between, and one of North America’s greatest living writers.”
  • Liliana Colanzi wrote that “Rivera Garza accomplishes prodigious things in all her books.”
  • Publishers Weekly described Autobiography of Cotton as “an impassioned testament to resilience and struggle.”
  • Kirkus Reviews called Autobiography of Cotton “a masterful blend of genres.”


Selected Recent Reviews, Interviews, and Public Programs

  • “Blowing Up Borders: An Interview with Cristina Rivera Garza.” Southwest Review, 2026.
  • “Cristina Rivera Garza on Autobiography of Cotton with Rita Indiana.” The International Library, The Center for Fiction, 2026.
  • “Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiography of Cotton.” City of Asylum Pittsburgh, 2026.
  • Snow, Anita. “A Review of Autobiography of Cotton.” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, 21 Mar. 2026.
  • Cook, Dylan. “Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza.” Cleaver Magazine, 3 Feb. 2026.
  • “The Lives That Cotton Made.” Southwest Review, 3 Feb. 2026.
  • “An Evening with Cristina Rivera Garza.” Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, 2025.
  • “Sharp as a Story.” Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 2025.