I’ve been telling stories for as long as I can remember. I began writing them as soon as I could spell, filling notebooks with imagined worlds, characters, and adventures. In high school, I even embroidered images from my stories onto my jeans. Apparently, paper wasn’t always a wide enough canvas.
My interests have never been particularly obedient or static. I love medieval history, speculative fiction, mythology, folklore, poetry, gardens, cooking, and the ways literature and memory inhabit the landscapes around us. I’m equally at home contemplating an Arthurian legend, the significance of food in a novel, the mythology of trees, or the possibility of a spaceship shaped like a flying chancla.
Sometimes these interests find their way into the same story.
Read more about me
A Life in Books, Words, and Learning
Books have been the one constant throughout my life. I’m a reader, writer, reviewer, and lifelong student, particularly interested in how stories preserve memory, create meaning, and connect seemingly unrelated worlds.
Over the years, I’ve assembled an extensive personal research library that has steadily claimed more and more of my living space. Its shelves reflect my wandering intellectual interests: literature, history, mythology, art, food, gardens, and whatever subject has most recently sent me down a research rabbit hole.
My library doubles as my home office and an increasingly ambitious indoor garden. Apartment living hasn’t discouraged my gardening instincts; it’s simply encouraged the plants to move in with the books. I live surrounded by bookshelves, notebooks, research materials, leafy companions, and a rather formidable collection of baking equipment, antique cooking tools, springform pans, and rolling pins of seemingly every conceivable size. Finding room for another bookcase, another plant, or another vintage kitchen treasure is an ongoing exercise in creative problem-solving.
I earned a Bachelor of Science in English from Northeastern University and a Master of Arts in English from Arizona State University. More recently, I returned to graduate study at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, pursuing a Master of Studies in Law with a certificate in healthcare compliance. My academic interests continue to expand into organizational leadership, institutional culture, and the relationships between people and the organizations in which they work.
Professionally, I’ve spent much of my career as an executive assistant and office manager, working in law, publishing, entertainment, and higher education. I’ve supported executives, attorneys, scholars, and organizational leaders; prepared legal and research documents; edited publications; developed policies and procedures; and worked with the written word in nearly every imaginable form.
My work has also taught me to observe closely. Earlier in my career, I worked in vocational evaluation, where detailed behavioral observations, research, and careful documentation were essential. Those experiences reinforced something that has always mattered to me as a writer: the importance of noticing what others might overlook.
Today, I work in university student health, supporting executive leadership while continuing my education and pursuing my creative projects.
I don’t see my professional, academic, and creative lives as separate endeavors. They inform one another. Each has taught me something about language, human behavior, institutions, culture, and the stories people tell about themselves.
Writing, Blogging, and the Literary Life
I began blogging in 2005 with Amoxcalli, my book review blog, discovering that the stories I’d been keeping in notebooks could find a home online.
What began as a personal literary endeavor grew into years of writing about books, authors, publishing, and the literary world. Amoxcalli evolved from its beginnings on Blogger into a self-hosted literary website featuring reviews, interviews, and literary news.
Over the years, I’ve written hundreds of book reviews, articles, essays, and literary commentaries, contributing to publications and online literary communities including La Bloga, Xispas, and Blogcritics.
Book reviewing has always been more than a matter of recommending what to read next. For me, it’s an opportunity to enter into conversation with another writer’s imagination, examine the historical and cultural contexts of a work, and discover connections between books that might otherwise seem unrelated.
My writing has also appeared in literary journals and anthologies.
My poem Cien Años, published in Poetic Diversity in February 2006, commemorated the birth of my grandson while honoring the memory of my grandfather—a reflection on generations, family, and the passage of time.
My speculative fiction includes Chanclas and Aliens, published in the anthology ¡Ban This! in 2012, and Lorca Green, published in Lowriting in 2014. I’ve also written about Chicano speculative fiction and the intersections of cultural identity, mythology, and the fantastic.
Through the years, I’ve moved between poetry, fiction, literary criticism, essays, book reviews, and blogging, often following an idea wherever it leads rather than worrying too much about which genre it belongs to.
Writing, for me, has never been confined to one form or one subject.
Stories, Mythologies, and Other Worlds
My fiction often brings together things that aren’t ordinarily expected to coexist.
In my Arthurian Cholos stories, medieval legend encounters Chicano culture, time travel, tacos, and a rather unconventional Holy Grail. The adventures continue in stories including Arthurian Cholos: A Brief History of Time & Tacos and Arthurian Cholos: Templars, Tacos, & Tonterías.
Elsewhere, dryads inhabit sycamore groves, gardens preserve memories, and familiar landscapes reveal unfamiliar possibilities.
I’m particularly interested in the relationship between landscape, narrative, and memory: how places hold stories, how we understand the world through them, and how imagination transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary.
My speculative fiction draws on folklore, mythology, history, cultural memory, and the occasional completely ridiculous idea that becomes considerably less ridiculous once I start writing it.
After all, if King Arthur can have a sword, why shouldn’t a cholo have a spaceship shaped like a chancla?
Doña Lupe’s Kitchen: Food, Literature, and Memory
I’ve always believed that food tells stories.
A recipe can preserve generations of family history. A familiar aroma can resurrect a childhood afternoon. A meal can reveal more about a fictional character than pages of dialogue.
I began writing Doña Lupe’s Kitchen, my food blog, in 2006. In 2007, it received Tu Ciudad magazine’s Best Narrative Food Blog recognition as part of its Best of Latino L.A. awards.
The blog became a place to explore family recipes, Mexican culinary traditions, cookbook reviews, cultural history, and the memories embedded in the foods we prepare and share.
I’m fascinated by food as a literary device, a mnemonic device, and a form of cultural inheritance. The foods we prepare, the recipes we preserve, and the meals we remember are part of the narratives through which we understand ourselves.
Cooking and baking also offer their own opportunities for experimentation, research, and occasionally spectacular failure. My kitchen contains enough specialized equipment and antique cooking implements to suggest that I might be operating a small culinary museum.
Of course, sometimes a loaf of bread is simply a loaf of bread, and the only literary question is whether I can finish a paragraph before the dough overproofs.
Gardens, Landscapes, Art, and France
If there’s a place where my interests converge, it’s probably a garden with a library nearby.
I’m fascinated by trees, particularly sycamores, and by the relationships between gardens, mythology, memory, and storytelling. Gardens are living narratives, changing with the seasons while preserving traces of what came before.
France occupies another important corner of my imagination. Its literature, art, villages, gardens, history, and landscapes have long fascinated me. I have a particular affection for the idea of a life surrounded by books, a garden, and the rhythms of a French village.
My interests in art range from the luminous skies of J. M. W. Turner and Dr. Atl to the cliffs of Étretat painted by Monet, the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, and the imaginative worlds of Maxfield Parrish.
Art, like literature, offers another way of reading the world.
Still Learning, Still Writing
I’ve spent a lifetime reading, writing, studying, researching, and collecting ideas. My interests have expanded rather than narrowed, and I see no reason to stop following them wherever they lead.
This website brings those interests together: fiction and poetry, books and literary criticism, food and memory, medieval history and speculative worlds, gardens and landscapes, France, professional experiences, academic explorations, and whatever else captures my curiosity.
Think of it as a library with several unexpected doors.
Some lead to gardens. Some lead to medieval castles. Some lead to kitchens. And at least one leads to a spaceship shaped like a chancla.
As for me, you’re most likely to find me somewhere between the bookshelves and the kitchen, making jam or baking bread, with a flour-dusted notebook, a sticky laptop on the table, and a story taking shape between stirring the pot and checking the oven.
Whether the jam, the bread, or the story gets finished first is anybody’s guess.