Kathleen Alcalá

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of The Deepest Roots, a work of speculative nonfiction on sustainability and island living. Her work has received the Governor’s Writers Award, the Western States Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, among others. A graduate of the MFA Program at the University of New Orleans and the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, Kathleen is editing an anthology on La Llorona, the Crying Woman of Mexican mythology, with Norma Elias Cantú. Her novels Spirits of the Ordinary and The Flower in the Skull have recently been republished by Raven Chronicles Press.

“My books explore forced migrations, identity, and our relationship with the land. Asa descendant of the Jewish expulsion from Spain during the Inquisition, as well as of the Opata Nation of the Sonoran Desert, I have researched and meditated deeply on our ruptured links to the land, and why we choose to honor or degrade it. Speculative writing offers us a way to examine the 'what if’s' of climate change, migration, and indigenous futurisms.”