Gabino Iglesias

Gabino Iglesias will be a Special Guest at ArmadilloCon 2023!

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, editor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels The Devil Takes You Home, Coyote Songs, and Zero Saints.

The Devil Takes You Home (Mulholland Books, August, 2022) is an Anthony Award Finalist! It has also been an Edgar Award Finalist, a Bram Stoker Award Finalist, a Book of the Month Club Pick, an August 2022 Indie Next List Selection and an ABA Indie Bestseller.

Coyote Songs (Broken River Books, October, 2018) won the 2019 Wonderland Book Award for excellence in Bizarro Fiction. It was a 2018 Bram Stoker nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

“Gabino Iglesias does not fuck around.” — Ross Nervig, in Southwest Review

“Dang…the writing here is like a Swiss Army knife opening to all its blades and widgets and then all those blades and widgets are used to cut you in different ways–killer horror-crime on display here.” – Chuck Wendig, author of Wanderers

“A bloody, phantasmagorical, angry, emotional, painfully topical, and beautiful blast of the hardest truth. This book wrecked me. A must read.” – Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World

“Texture, intriguing.” – Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist  and Hunger

Barrio Noir Knocks Twice: A Review of Gabino Iglesias’s Coyote Songs” – David Tromblay, author of Money the Hard Way

Gabino’s first novel, Zero Saints, is amazing.

“Call him the Barrio Palahniuk, a badass Henry Miller, Charles Willeford in Cholo-land–whatever the moniker, for my money Gabino Iglesias is one of the most fearless, original and riveting writers working today. If there’s any justice on this hellhole of a planet, Zero Saints–an instant, wild-ass classic–should launch its author far from outlier status into the wet, palpitating heart of contemporary literature. This is a fierce, nasty, beautiful, sucker-punch of a novel. You’d be an idiot not to read it immediately.” – Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty

See Francois Busnel’s review on France Télévisions, complete with special effects!

Gabino Iglesias is also a wonderful reviewer, someone whose thoughts on reading open doors and entice you to try new books and writers. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Iglesias writes excellent short stories. Austin Noir, a brand new entry in the series from Akashic Books, features his story “The Pink Monkey.” Other anthologies where his short work has appeared include Humans Are The Problem: A Monster’s Anthology and Come Join Us By the Fire Season 2,  the second installment of Tor Nightfire’s audio-only horror anthology.

Iglesias is Review Editor for Pank Magazine, “a literary magazine fostering access to innovative poetry and prose, publishing the brightest and most promising writers for the most adventurous readers. ” He edited the anthology Both Sides: Stories from the Border, which was an International Latino Book Award Medalist and was nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Anthology or Collection.

One of his earliest published pieces is “An Awful ‘Why?’ Hung Over My Head,” appeared in The New York Times in 2009, early in his time as a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

He went on to complete his Ph.D. dissertation, Digital DREAM: the DREAMer Identity, Struggle, and Political Engagement on Facebook, in December, 2016. The dedications in his dissertation include “the homeless people who shared the Yarborough
Library with me this past two years. We are all equally displaced. I hope we someday find a good place to stay.”

CC BY 2.0: Austin Yarborough Branch Library – Kari Sullivan, Via Flickr.