Gina Balibrera earned an MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she was also a postgraduate fellow. She’s been awarded grants from the Gould Center, the Rackham Institute, a Tyson Award, the Aura Estrada Prize, the Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship, and the Periplus Collective. She’s at work on a novel set in 1930s El Salvador. Not sure if you do photo credits, but the photographer is named Aysegül Savas.
Project description: At Tin House Gina will be working on her novel The Volcano Daughters, which is forthcoming from Pantheon in 2023, as well as writing some new short fiction and essays. [Elevator pitch/book deal announcement for that novel:] The Volcano Daughters is the story of two sisters raised under the thumb of El Salvador’s brutal dictator El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, taking them from Hollywood to Paris to San Francisco, each watched over by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their childhood friends who were killed in La Matanza but are not done telling their own stories.
Residency: 2022 Parents