This workshop institutes a cultural aspect to the writing of historical stories that challenges the traditional linear and formalist approaches to writing “history”. Following the influence of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton, this workshop will work toward being able to incorporate cultural, family, and personal stories into a new way of writing prose or poetry.
Christopher Carmona is the author of El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande, which was a finalist for the 2019 Best Young Adult Novel for the Texas Institute of Letters. Currently, he is working on finishing this series of YA novels. Book Two is out now. His short story collection, The Road to Llorona Park, won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBC News. He has a chapter in Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on Borderlands History discussing intergenerational trauma for Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.
As an educational activist, Carmona serves as a board member of the national award-winning organization, Refusing To Forget, which researches and promotes the history of violence against Mexican Americans and Latinos in the early 20th Century and beyond. Currently he serves as the Chair of the NACCS Tejas Foco Committee on Implementing MAS in PreK-12 Education in Texas. He was a leader in getting the TEKS-based Mexican American Studies High School Course approved by the Texas State Board of Education, which is the only State Board approved Mexican American Studies course in the United States to date. He served on Responsible Ethnic Studies Textbook committee that was awarded the “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” award for excellence in educational leadership from the Mexican American School Board Association (MASBA).
