Award winning author Sergio Troncoso stopped by the Bunker to talk about his eighth book, an edited collection titled Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in Between Worlds. Along with his writing, he’s the President of Texas Institute of Letters, board member of the Author’s Guild Council, and judge for the PEN/Faulkner Awards.
So, obviously, he and Brad spent a ton of time talking about growing up in small towns, and Sergio’s propensity to write truths other people didn’t necessarily want to hear!
About Sergio Troncoso
Sergio Troncoso is the author of eight books: A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, the novels The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust; and as editor, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds and Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence. Nobody’s Pilgrims: A Novel is forthcoming in 2022.
Among the numerous awards he has won are the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories, Southwest Book Award, Bronze Award for Essays from ForeWord Reviews, and the Silver and Bronze Awards for Multicultural Fiction from ForeWord Reviews. For many years, he has taught fiction and nonfiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. He is president of the Texas Institute of Letters. His literary papers are archived at The Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, Texas.
The son of Mexican immigrants, Troncoso was born in El Paso, Texas and now lives in New York City. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received two graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy from Yale University. He won a Fulbright scholarship to Mexico, where he studied economics, politics, and literature. He was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters. The El Paso City Council voted unanimously to rename the public library branch in Ysleta as the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library. He has served as a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the New Letters Literary Awards in the Essay category.
Books
- Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in Between Worlds
- Nobody’s Pilgrims: A Novel
- A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
- The Nature of Truth
- From This Wicked Patch of Dust
- Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
- Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence
- The Last Tortilla and Other Stories
