Quick Facts
Biography
Angela Morales (born 1966, Los Angeles, CA) is a Mexican-American essayist, writer, and educator. She is the author of The Girls In My Town: Essays, published by the University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Her essays appear in River Teeth, The Baltimore Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Pinch, Hobart, Under the Sun, The Indianola Review, and 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, and other magazines.
Life
Morales grew up in San Gabriel, California. Many of her autobiographical essays describe growing up in Southern California during the 1970s. Some of the themes in her writing include motherhood, violence, female coming-of-age, and Mexican American cultural identity. A graduate of the University of California, Davis and the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, Morales currently teaches English at Glendale Community College in Southern California. She lives in Pasadena, California with her husband Patrick Conyers and their children, Mira and Leo.
Awards
Morales is the recipient of the River Teeth Book Prize and the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essay "The Girls in My Town" appeared in The Best American Essays, 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed, and her essay "Bloodyfeathers, R.I.P." appeared as notable essay in Best American Essays 2015. Her essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and her Master's Thesis, Exhuming Abuelita was awarded the San Francisco Foundation's James Phelan prize for nonfiction manuscript-in-progress. She worked as the Writer-in-Residence in Denali National Park and has been awarded a fellowship at MacDowell Colony.