Speaker: Daniel A. Olivas, Author

Daniel A. Olivas is a Pasadena-based author and attorney whose books include Chicano Frankenstein, How to Date a Flying Mexican, and the forthcoming My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions (University of Nevada Press).

My Chicano Heart is a collection of Olivas's favorite previously published tales about love, along with five new stories, that explore the complex, mysterious, and occasionally absurd machinations of people who simply want to be appreciated and treasured. Readers will encounter characters who scheme, search, and flail in settings that are sometimes fantastical and other times mundane: a man who literally gives his heart to his wife who keeps it beating safely in a wooden box; a woman who takes a long-planned trip through New Mexico but, mysteriously, without the company of her true love; a lonely man who gains a remarkably compatible roommate who may or may not be real.

Each story is drawn from Olivas’s nearly 25 years of experience writing fiction deeply steeped in Chicano and Mexican culture. Some of these stories are fanciful and full of magic, while others are more realistic, and still others border on noir. All touch upon that most ephemeral and confounding of human emotions: love in all its wondrous forms.