Meet our resident writer
Cristina Rivera Garza
April 20-24, 2026
Cristina Rivera Garza is one of the best-known Mexican American and Latin American authors today. She was born in Tamaulipas – a northern Mexican state on the border with Texas – into a mixed-race immigrant family, as she narrates in Autobiography of Cotton (2020). She obtained a PhD in History from the University of Houston in 1995, after graduating as a Sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Apart from her long career as a scholar, teaching and researching in universities in Mexico and the USA, she has published more than 20 works in a wide variety of genres: from poetry, novels and short stories to essays, non-fiction, theater, and even opera. She has been a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in the US, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico (twice), the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature in France, the DAAD artist fellowship in Germany, and many other important prizes and grants.
Rivera Garza is currently the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. In 2023 she became member of the prestigious cultural institution El Colegio Nacional in Mexico, and since then she lives between Mexico City and Houston. In 2024 Cristina was listed as one of the BBC’s ‘100 inspiring and influential women from around the world’, and in 2025 she was appointed as Curator in Residence at the International Literature Festival in Berlin.
Her book Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in the category of Memoir or Autobiography; according to the jury, ‘through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today’.
Events with Cristina Rivera Garza in St Andrews (admission free)
Creative Writing Workshop (in Spanish)
Wednesday 22 April 2026, 10-11am
Younger Hall-Seminar Room 2
This is an event especially designed for undergraduates in Spanish, but any Spanish speaker is welcome.
Research café, ‘The affective archive: bodies and collective memory in Liliana’s Invincible Summer’
Wednesday 22 April 2026, 1-2:30 pm
UCO: School I
‘Earthbound. A public conversation on women, freedom and travel with Cristina Rivera Garza’.
Friday 24 April 2026, 5-6:30 pm
UCO: School I
The event includes book signing and wine reception
After her week in St Andrews, Cristina Rivera Garza will be in Edinburgh reading her poetry in translation, if you wish to attend please book a free place on the Eventbrite portal