Juan Velasco is a Professor in the Department of English at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and U.S. Latinx Literature. His first novel, Enamorado, was published in Spain in 2000. He wrote the foreword for Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California in 2002, and the academic book, Las fronteras moviles: tradición y modernidad en la Literatura Chicana contemporánea in 2003. With David Pace he created the DVD  poetry, Call Me When I Am Gone in 2008.  He published Massacre of the Dreamers/La masacre de los soñadores in Spain in 2011, which Ron Hansen describes in the introduction as a “frightening, tragic and heartbreaking” poetic meditation on the Old West. In 2016, he published Cultural Resistance and Collective Identity in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography, and in 2020 the memoir, 1988: NY-LA (Crónica de un viaje a América). Most recently, he was the co-editor of In Xochitl in Cuicatl: Floricanto (An Anthology of Latinx Poetry).  The expression of gifts, and the act of sharing them, led to offering healing and  justice to our world.  Professor Velasco created in 2007, Programa Velasco, whose mission is to cultivate opportunities for children’s education in El Salvador. For more information visit: http://programavelasco.org/

Website: https://blogs.scu.edu/writeherewritenow/

Twitter Username: @WriteJuan

Employment

• Professor at Santa Clara University (September 2000 - September 2013)

Degrees

• Doctoral Degree in Latinx Literature from University of California, Los Angeles (June 1995)

Genres of Interest

Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Poetry