2014 Miami Book Fair | Maria Venegas

Maria Venegas was born in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States when she was four years old. Venegas’ short stories and memoir excerpts have appeared in Ploughshares, Granta, the Guardian, and Huizache. She has taught creative writing at Hunter College, and currently works as a mentor at Still Waters in a Storm, a reading and writing sanctuary for children in Brooklyn. National Book Award Winner Collum McCann says of Venegas’ debut memoir, Bulletproof Vest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $26.00), “This is a contemporary corrido—a ballad of America, a love song to Mexico, and an intertwined family history, all brilliantly realized in sharp, precise, poetic prose.”

After a fourteen-year estrangement, Maria Venegas returns to Mexico from the United States to visit her father, who is living in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. While spending the following summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fences, he begins sharing stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence—from the final conversations he had with his own father, to his extradition from the United States for murder, to his mother’s pride after he shot a man for the first time at the age of twelve. Moving between Mexico and New York, between past and present, Venegas traces her own life and her father’s. Over time, a new closeness and understanding develops between them.

2014 Miami Book Fair