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Daniel Chacón
A middle-aged Chicano man with tousled hair speaks into a microphone. He has his right elbow resting on the table in front of him, his right palm facing out towards the audience.
Chacón at AWP 2017
Born 1962 (age 61–62)
Fresno, California, U.S.
Occupation Writer, educator
Language English
Nationality American
Education California State University, Fresno (BA)
University of Oregon (MFA)
Genres Fiction, Chicano literature
Notable awards American Book Awards
Hudson Prize
PEN Oakland Award

Daniel Chacón is a Chicano short story writer, novelist, essayist, editor, professor, and radio host based in El Paso, Texas. He chairs the University of Texas, El Paso's creative writing graduate program, the country's only bilingual MFA program. He founded the Chicano Writers and Artists Association with Fresno State classmate and close friend Andrés Montoya in 1985.

Early life

Chacón was born and raised in Fresno, California; his father was from El Paso, Texas. One of his brothers is writer Kenneth Robert Chacón, from whom he was estranged for many years. He earned a BA in Political Science from California State University, Fresno and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Oregon. While at CSU, he wrote for the campus newspaper La Voz de Aztan.

Career

Chacón joined the MFA program at University of Texas El Paso as an assistant professor in Creative Writing in 2000 and has been the department chair since 2017. Since 2011, he has co-hosted the KTEP show Words on a Wire; his original co-host was Benjamin Alire Sáenz and is now Tim Z. Hernandez. Guests include Alison Hawthorne Deming, Francisco Aragón, and Garrett Hongo. He serves at the assistant director of the Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation and was appointed chair for the International Association of Burn Camps' Board of Directors in 2018, and is part of the Southwest Festival of the Written Word's advisory board.

He has also edited several books, including A Jury of Trees (a posthumous collection of poetry by Andrés Montoya) (2017), The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: The Selected Work of José Antonio Burciaga (2008; with Mimi Reisel Gladstein) and Colón-ization: The Posthumous Poems of Andrés Montoya (2017). His writing has also appeared in several anthologies: Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge (2006), and Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the West Side of the Missouri (2009), among others. Journals that have published his work include ZYZZYVA, Americas Review, Bilingual Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, and Callaloo. He also dabbles in playwrighting, standup, and poetry.

Personal life

Chacón is married and has a step-daughter. His first child was born in 2020. He began speaking Spanish in 1996.

Awards and honors

Chacón has received a grant from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019.

Book Year Award Name Award Body Reference
Godoy Lives 2000 Peter and Jean de Maine Award for an Emerging Writer in Fiction Clackamas Literary Review
Unending Rooms 2007 Hudson Prize Black Lawrence Press
The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga 2009 American Book Awards Before Columbus Foundation
Hotel Juárez 2014 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award PEN Oakland
Tejas Award for Best Book of Fiction National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies

Selected works

Title Publisher Date Length ISBN
Chicano Chicanery Arte Público Press 1996 144 pp (paperback) ISBN: 978-1611920918
and the shadows took him Washington Square Press 2005 352 pp (paperback) ISBN: 978-0743466394
Unending Rooms Black Lawrence Press 2008 235 pp (paperback) ISBN: 978-0981589930
Hotel Juárez Arte Público Press 2012 197 pp (paperback) ISBN: 978-1558857681
The Cholo Tree Piñata Books 2017 248 pp (paperback) ISBN: 978-1558858404
Kafka in a Skirt: Stories from the Wall University of Arizona Press 2019 168 pp (paperback) ISBN: 978-0816539918
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