Manuel Muñoz

Manuel Muñoz is an American short story writer and novelist whose work explores Mexican-American experience in the Central Valley of California with lyrical precision and deep historical awareness. Born in Dinuba, California, he received his BA from Harvard University and his MFA from Cornell University. The Consequences (2022), his third short story collection, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in 2023 and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His debut collection Zigzagger (2003) was widely praised, and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (2007) was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and won a Whiting Award. His novel What You See in the Dark (2011) is set in the Central Valley and weaves the murder of a young woman with a fictional account of the filming of Psycho in a local motel. Muñoz has received three O. Henry Prize Stories selections and has been included in Best American Short Stories. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he lives. His work is distinguished by its attention to working-class Chicano life, its formal precision, and its engagement with the silence, shame, and survival that structure life in agricultural communities.