Muñoz, Manuel 1972–

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Muñoz, Manuel 1972–

PERSONAL:

Born 1972, in Dinuba, CA. Education: Harvard University, B.A.; Cornell University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Stuart Bernstein, Representation for Artists, 63 Carmine St., 3D, New York, NY 10014.

CAREER:

Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Constance Saltonstall Foundation Individual Artist's Grant in Fiction; National Endowmen for the Arts fellowship in fiction, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Zigzagger, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2003.

The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

Hailed by Fresno Famous contributor Jefferson Beavers as a "promising voice in contemporary Latino literature, Manuel Muñoz has written two well-received collections of short fiction inspired by his childhood in California's San Joaquin Valley. The son of farmworkers, Muñoz spent his childhood summers working in the fields and, later, got a job in a school warehouse to earn money for school supplies and clothes. A bright student, he received encouragement at school and became the first person in his family to graduate from college. Attending Harvard was a culture shock; he had left home with only a hundred dollars to cover books and expenses, and did not fit in with the majority of students on campus, who came from privileged backgrounds. He coped, as he explains on his home page, by writing, which offered him "much-needed self-expression."

Zigzagger, Muñoz's first collection, focuses on gay Latinos who are on the cusp of adulthood. Booklist reviewer Hazel Rochman enjoyed the fact that Muñoz's treatment of this theme is "not the usual shame-about-coming-out stuff." The stories, according to Los Angeles Times contributor David Ebershoff, show the plight of Central Valley's loneliest characters: "gay boys who drive up and down the country roads to find one another; fathers broken by decades of field work, a bright young woman who has made it to twenty without getting pregnant, unlike every other girl she knows." Ebershoff noted the book's honesty and despair, emphasizing that Muñoz is "too truthful a writer to present false hope." Zigzagger, he added, "heralds the arrival of a gifted and sensitive writer."

Similar praise met publication of Muñoz's second collection, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. Set in Fresno, California, the book illuminates characters who long for escape, transcendence, or acceptance: a young gay man who defers his own life to care for his disabled mother; a grieving mother who discovers, when she cleans her dead son's room, that the man who died with him in a motorcycle accident was his lover; a father mourning his son's suicide. "Muñoz writes with restraint and without pretension," commented a Publishers Weekly contributor, "giving fearless voice to personal tragedies." Jeff Turrentine, writing in New York Times Book Review, called the book a "moving and tender" collection with a narrative energy that "derives from the friction between the characters' conflicting desires for love and acceptance, escape and permanence." Muñoz's stories, in Turrentine's view, transcend the categories of gay or Chicano fiction, and are universal. A writer for Kirkus Reviews expressed similar enthusiasm, describing The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue as "fine storytelling that achieves universality while remaining rooted in a particular time and place." Reviewing the book in the Austin Chronicle, Belinda Acosta wrote: "Each [story] lingers, staying with you like memories stirred from the scent in a lost loved one's shirt. In a word, [the book is] exquisite."

Muñoz told CA: "While at the Cornell M.F.A. program, I began a crucial mentorship with the Chicana writer Helena Maria Viramontes, who introduced me to key texts of Chicano/a literature and helped shape many of the early stories of Zigzagger. I cited her continued presence in my writing life in the acknowledgements to my second book, calling her ‘a literary madrina … on every page here, and those still to come.’"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Austin Chronicle (Austin, TX), September 7, 2007, Belinda Acosta, review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue.

Booklist, November 15, 2003, Hazel Rochman, review of Zigzagger, p. 581; March 15, 2007, Keir Graff, review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, p. 26.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2007, review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, p. 94.

Library Journal, January, 2004, Harold Augenbraum, review of Zigzagger, p. 162.

Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2004, David Ebershoff, review of Zigzagger, p. 9.

New York Times Book Review, August 5, 2007, Jeff Turrentine, review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue.

Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2007, review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, p. 37.

School Library Journal, April, 2007, Teri Titus, review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, p. 170.