Manuel Muñoz is the author of three collections of short stories: The Consequences, published by Graywolf Press in 2022, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and Zigzagger. A novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in 2011. Muñoz is a recipient of a Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, the winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a Whiting Writers Award. His stories have three times been awarded the O. Henry Prize and have twice appeared in the annual The Best American Short Stories. A native of Dinuba, California, Muñoz is Professor at the University of Arizona-Tucson.

In Manuel’s Words

“My community is too often regarded in narrow, shallow dimensions. The short stories I write are proof to the world that we are as complex and complicated as art demands and that our lives belong in works of art. My stories are not essays or tracts, nor do they merely refute bias or prejudice. They are evidence of our existence and the very human emotions that coil around our lives. Reading sustains me. The stories that haunt me in my reading seem to hold the entire world in them, even as I know that a single short story cannot contain everything. That is the challenge of the story form and why I write them. If a story can stir the senses with enough detail and provoke an intense emotion, it might lead toward compassion. The stories that shake me nearly always do that, as if touching a moral live wire: once we encounter a story that might push us past the limits of our imaginations, ignoring it is a deliberate choice.”