Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Writer and journalist
(Bogotá, Colombia, 1985)
She grew up in the years when violence was a constant presence in Colombia. Her family migrated to the United States via Venezuela when she was fourteen years old. Her essays and stories have been published in media outlets such as The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and Electric Literature. The publication of her debut novel La fruta del borrachero (Impedimenta, 2020; in English, Fruit of the Drunken Tree), which is set in Colombia during the convulsive decade of the 1990s, has situated her among the promising Latin American fiction writers who are being published in English. Rojas Contreras has received several prizes and grants from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Camargo Foundation, and Hedgebrook. She is presently teaching Fiction at the University of San Francisco and is also a visiting professor at Saint Mary’s College, California. She is now working on a family memoir of her grandfather, a Colombian healer of whom it was said he could move clouds.
Update: 23 September 2020