Margaret Elysia Garcia
Macondo fellow Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the poetry collection the daughterland (El Martillo Press, 2023), the short story collections Chicana Noir and Other Stories (El Martillo Press, 2026) and Graft (Tolsun Books, 2022), and the poetry chapbooks Your House is on Fire (Daxson Publishing, 2026), Iconistas!, and Burn Scars, (Lit Kit Collective, 2025, 2022). She’s the co-editor of the Golden Poppy Award finalist in non-fiction anthology Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country (AK Press, 2025). She’s the winner of the James L. Doti Outstanding Graduate Student Award from Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.
"A collection that focuses on the pursuit of identity and cultural memory."
–Kirkus Reviews
"Margaret Elysia Garcia’s writing is enthralling, introspective and honest. In Chicana Noir and Other Stories, she elevates commonplace people and events and infuses them with metaphoric and, at times, horrific meaning. She peels back the facade of the ordinary to reveal an underside of frustrated desires, hidden motivations and unfulfilled dreams. Garcia is an original literary voice whose writing is top notch!"
–Jesús Salvador Treviño, author of The Fabulous Sinkhole and Other Stories, The Skyscraper That Flew and Other Stories and American Book Award-winning Return to Arroyo Grande
"In Chicana Noir and Other Stories, the real horror isn't supernatural—it's adjuncting without health insurance. From the fever dream of "Chicana Noir Story #1" to the revenge fantasy of "The Last Cruise," Margaret Elysia Garcia writes with the urgency of someone who knows that survival itself is resistance. Garcia's narrators exist in the margins: too educated for some spaces, not "authentic" enough for others, navigating a world where the supernatural feels way more believable than the American Dream. A demon sits on your chest in your dead brother's room. Your grandmother practices witchcraft to protect the family. A serial killer terrorizes the city while three teenage girls form a blood pact. From "Come and Play" to "The Last Cruise," these stories pulse with the rhythm of Whittier Boulevard, the Smiths on repeat, and the complicated inheritance of being a Chicana-in-Doc-Martens in a country that wants you invisible. Garcia has created something rare: a collection that's both deeply personal and politically urgent, where punk feminism meets magical realism and neither apologizes for taking up the space."
–Ariel Gore, author of We Were Witches, The Wayward Writer, and Rehearsals for Dying
"These stories are beautifully constructed, line by line creations, portraits, pictures of darkness and light in the lives of characters we come to know as though they live next door. And in many cases they do, and we do not see them. Frank O'Connor said that the soul of the short story as an art form arose in what he called, "Submerged populations," those who were "overlooked or marginalized" in the countries where they lived. Well, here is the short story, the art form itself, robust as ever, in Margaret Elysia Garcia's hands."
–Richard Bausch, author of The Fate of Others (Penguin Random House) and The Stories of Richard Bausch (Harper Perennial), winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story
“the daughterland is a Plathian interrogation of Mexican motherhood during the regressive Covid-era by a mother who was a daughter during the arms race, Ronald Reagan, and socially-accepted toxic masculinity. Garcia’s poems are the secrets parents wish they didn’t have to keep to themselves.”
––Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Musician, professor, author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band
“Margaret Elysia Garcia may be my favorite living poet, a maestra of the form. In our era of sacrifice, young blood spilled, and hummingbirds that fly too close to the sun, Garcia tenders her exquisite language, late-stage lyricism, & fullnamed, full-throated mestiza cri de cuento.”
––Susie Bright, author of Susie Bright’s Sexual State of the Union and Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
“Margaret Elysia Garcia paints poems of a mother’s broken-heartedness with unfiltered ferociousness, her daughter’s life as palette. While we can’t know our daughters’ traumas, we do try. We hope they forgive our failures to protect them. How could we? Garcia’s written her own mother-comforting failure salve, her own writer-comforting vengeance.”
––Jenny Forrester, author of Narrow River, Wide Sky: A Memoir and Soft Hearted Stories: Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists, and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism
“Breathtaking. A brave and timely work. Margaret Elysia Garcia digs deep into the personal to reach the universal stream. The poems in this volume come together like an underground chorus of the female experience here and now at the edge of the world, burning and surviving.”
––Ariel Gore, author of The Wayward Writer: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar
“the daughterland is an urgent and beautiful collection of poetry that speaks to the bonds of mother and daughter and the many faces of survival. Margaret Elysia Garcia’s voice soars as she chronicles an authentic account of her experience as a Latina mother celebrating her heritage and supporting her daughter through bigotry, sexism, and trauma.”
—Teresa Berkowitz, editor of Tangled Locks Journal
BOOKING
To inquire about booking Margaret Elysia Garcia for a paid reading or workshop: