A.J. Rodriguez is a Chicano writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Oregon’s M.F.A. program, where he received the Logsdon Fiction Award. In addition to MacDowell, his work has been supported by Yaddo and the Kerouac Project. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades, judged by Jonathan Escoffery. His fiction also appears in New England Review, Passages North, The Common, and elsewhere. He is the forty-third annual Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C.
While at MacDowell, Rodriguez completed edits on his debut book, a novel-in-stories about a biracial Chicano coming of age in Albuquerque's "War Zone" barrio. He also embarked on another writing project, a polyphonic novel following a cast of Chicanx characters tangled up in the complicated lives and legacies of two rival boxers.
