2025 Featured Speaker: Marcela Fuentes

Marcela Fuentes is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and essayist. Her essays and stories have appeared in Texas Highways Magazine, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA) and Georgia State University (PhD). She was the 2016-2017 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Marcela lives in Fort Worth, where she is a professor of creative writing at TCU.

Her debut novel Malas received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Booklist, and was selected Good Morning America Book Club’s pick for June 2024. Malas was longlisted for the Center For Fiction’s 2024 First Novel Prize.

Her second book, the story collection My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse, is forthcoming from Viking Books in 2025.