Brief Author Bio:

Virginia Martinez is a contemporary American writer of Mexican descent, born in Allende, Nuevo Leon, Mexico and raised in Dallas, Texas since the age of five. She has spent most of her life in Dallas, Texas, where she attended Southern Methodist University and majored in English Literature earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2002 and a Master of Arts degree in 2004. Alanis began her teaching career with an appointment from the Dallas County Community College District as visiting scholar to Brookhaven College for a two year term from 2004-2006. She was then invited to teach at Mountain View College where she continues her teaching career as a professor of English. She is at work on her first novel on the romanticizing of the American Dream from the perspective of Mexican-Americans who have lived in the U.S. for generations and Mexican immigrants who must navigate between the cultural values of their birthplace and their adopted home. Alanis lives in Dallas, Texas with her husband and their three children.

Alanis’s fiction is autobiographical and frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and others in the Mexican communities with which she is familiar. Alanis inserts struggles, anxieties, and biases under a microscope as to better chronicle the nuances and details of immigrant and Mexican American psychology and behavior.

Virginia Alanis is part of a new generation of immigrant writers who are bilingual, bicultural and have a global worldview. These writers include: Junot Diaz, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Daniel Alarcon, and Edwidge Danticat