克里斯蒂娜·里维拉·加尔萨

Cristina Rivera Garza (born October 1, 1964) is a Mexican author and professor known for her fiction and memoir. Multiple novels, including Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry), received Mexico's highest literary awards and international honors. Born in the state of Tamaulipas, near the Mexico–U.S. border, she is a teacher and a writer who has worked in both Mexico and the United States. She taught history and creative writing at various universities and institutions, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Tec de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, and University of California, San Diego, but currently holds a position at the University of Houston. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020, and other recent accolades include the Juan Vicente Melo National Short Story Award, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (Rivera Garza is one of two authors to win this award twice), and the Anna Seghers Prize.

Her 2023 memoir, Liliana's Invincible Summer, which documents her sister's life and her 1990 murder at the age of twenty by a boyfriend, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction and won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. The book paints a portrait of her sister's life as well as investigating the causes of and society's response to intimate partner violence.

Life

Rivera Garza was born on October 1, 1964, in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in the northeast of Mexico on the border with the United States. She is fluent in English and Spanish and has had a desire to write since her teenage years.

She did her undergraduate studies in sociology at ENEP-Acatlán – part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) – then went on to study her master’s in Latin American history at UNAM. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Houston (1995). Her doctoral thesis was on the subjection of the human body to state power in mental asylums in early 20th-century Mexico.

She has lived in various places in Mexico as well as in the United States, developing her teaching career on both sides of the border, living in Mexico City, Toluca, Houston, and San Diego. Rivera Garza spent some of her “decisive years” studying in Mexico City, which she says has given her a personal and intimate relationship with Mexico’s capital, featured in her novel Nadie me verá llorar. However, she never permanently moved to the capital, which is Mexico’s literary center, making her feel outside of the country’s literary scene. She has also stated that she does not like the concentration of Mexico’s culture in the capital.

While she declines to use words to describe herself, she does state that “I am me and my keyboard.” She states that her personality is not fixed, and such would be limiting. Rivera Garza maintains interests in narrative, history, and the nature of human language/communication. She believes that writing can be a question of life or death, and that writers should misbehave in real life as well as in the imagination to be connected to the world and better able to tell stories.

Teaching career

Rivera Garza has always had a full-time job in teaching, which limits her time for creative writing, for which she is better known. Her first professorship was with San Diego State University from 1997 to 2004, teaching Mexican history. In 2001, CECUT/Centro Cultural de Tijuana invited her to teach a class in creative writing, which she says changed her "personal dynamics, a lot of my relationships with Mexico" being in a Spanish dominant academic environment again.

In 2004, she returned to Mexico as a professor of humanities at Tec de Monterrey, Toluca Campus, where she was co-director. In 2008, she returned to San Diego as a professor of creative writing at the literature department of the University of California, San Diego.

Rivera has also taught at UNAM, the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEM), DePauw University, and has done research into popular conceptions of insanity and the history of psychiatry in Mexico. Her research work has appeared in journals such as Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, as well as journals in England and Argentina.

As of March 2026, Rivera is a M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and the director and founder of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. The Creative Writing Program is the first Ph. D. program in Creative Writing in Spanish in the United States.

Writing career

Rivera Garza is one of the most prolific Mexican writers in her generation, receiving grants from CME (1984), FONCA (1994, 1999), and the Centro de Estudios México-Estados Unidos (1998). In addition to writing books, she has collaborated with publications such as El Cuento, El Sol de Toluca, Excélsior, La Guillotina, La Palabra y El Hombre, Macrópolis, Nacional, Punto de Partida, Revista de la UAEM and San Quintin.

Rivera has also explored the digital realm as a venue for the publication of creative works. This began with blogging, starting with a now defunct site called Blogsívela, a novel/blog written with the participation of readers. She has blogged since the late 1990s, with her current blog dating from 2004. However, instead of using her blog solely for promotional purposes, as most other writers do, Rivera Garza uses the resource to publish material that is more experimental and unconstrained by the requirements of traditional publishing. She has also experimented with Twitter (@criveragarza), with her tweets described as developing meta commentaries both on tweeting and on literature, stating: "Look at it this way: an article is three or four tweets surrounded by text." She coined the term "tweetnovel" (tuitnovela in Spanish) as a timeline written by the characters. Various people participate in the creative but there is someone responsible for the timeline.