PUBLISHED WORK
Michael is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and the Association of Writers and Writing Program (AWP). He’s published critical essays, book reviews, academic work on literature, and poetry. He’s currently writing his debut novel and has forthcoming essays. He is passionate about fiction and focuses on immigration, culture, and diverse voices. See below for samples.
CRITICAL ESSAYS
The Rubble of Memory: On Francisco Goldman’s Monkey Boy (LA Review of Books, August 2021
Go Forth: Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues (Believer Magazine online, August 2019)
This Land is My Land, Not Yours (on In the Distance by Hernán Díaz) (Ploughshares, March 2019)
Four Women’s Voices Reshaping Asian and Asian-American Immigrant Stories (Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2018)
Deconstructing Myths and Male Influence in Fruit of the Drunken Tree (The Millions, July 2018)
In the Pursuit of Honor: Three Social Deaths in Fortunata y Jacinta (Tropos 37 2013 pp. 100-17)
BOOK REVIEWS
American Estrangement by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (Ploughshares, August 2021)
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (Ploughshares, January 2021)
Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero (Plougshares, March 2020)
Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (Ploughshares, January 2020)
The Criminal Child by Jean Genet (Ploughshares, January 2020)
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Plougshares, September 2019)
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Ploughshares, August 2019)
Building Alternative Communities: On Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans (LA Review Books, March 2019)
Complicate the Border: Octavio Solis’s Retablos (The Millions, October 2018)
The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, by Franco Moretti (Romance Quarterly 61.4 2014 pp. 279-80)
Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel: A Publishing History, by Sally Dugan (Rocky Mountain Review 67.2, 2013 pp. 158-60)
Clío y la mágica peñola: Historia y novela (1885-1912), by Francisco Caudet (Anales Galdosianos 47, 2012 pp. 101-2)
PHD Thesis
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
Realist Strategies: The Function of the Child in Novels by Galdós (2014)
POETRY
The Michigan Quarterly Review’s Mixtape, 2021
-Central American History Lessons
-Try Forgetting Your Tongue
Fósforo 6, 2009
-La institución
-Buenas nuevas
Fósforo 3, 2006
-Mi patria
-Oda a Federico García Lorca
-Mi celeste
Fósforo 2, 2005
-Latiendo sin sentido