Katrina Carrasco

Katrina is writing a novel and exploring how queer writers might use fiction to repair gaps, erasures, and fractures in the LGBTQIA+ historical record.

Commenced 2024

Katrina Carrasco. (Photo by Jennifer Boyle Photography)
Writer and PhD Creative Writing student, Katrina Carrasco. (Photo by Jennifer Boyle Photography)

Katrina Carrasco writes novels, short stories, and essays. Her debut novel, The Best Bad Things (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), was a Lambda Literary Awards and Washington State Book Awards finalist and won a Shamus Award. Her second novel, Rough Trade (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), was a New York Times Book Review Best Crime Novel of 2024, one of the New Yorker's Best Books We've Read in 2024, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2024.

Katrina's short fiction and essays have appeared in publications and on websites including Witness Magazine, Post Road Magazine, Literary Hub, and CrimeReads. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Jentel Arts, I-Park, Blue Mountain Center, Willapa Bay AiR, Mineral School, Lighthouse Works, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Storyknife Writers Retreat, and has received additional support from Artist Trust, the Barbara G. Peters Fellowship, and the Whiting Foundation. Katrina holds a BA in English from UCLA and an MFA in Fiction from Portland State University, where she was awarded the Tom and Phyllis Burnam Graduate Fiction Scholarship, a Laurels Award Full Tuition Scholarship, and the Tom Doulis Graduate Fiction Writing Award.

Katrina writes: 'The critical component of my thesis project will explore how we might use fiction to repair our connection to queer people of the past. So much of queer history has been suppressed, made monstrous, or erased, leaving us with a fractured record of our LGBTQIA+ ancestors. I will explore how queer writers—specifically those working in queer historical fiction—make meaning and craft stories out of incomplete or scant remnants, and how these works of fiction may restore a sense of "history", meaning a sense of inherited legacy and ancestral presence, to queer people today.

'The creative component of my thesis is a novel set in Imperial Valley, California, in the early 2000s. This region is part of the Mexico/U.S. borderlands, an area rich with Indigenous, Mexican, and American history that has been cut up by the border, defaced with walls, and weaponized by the American government. Amid the novel's exploration of American state-sanctioned violence, a cast of queer characters come together to investigate mysterious occurrences in the valley and how they might relate to a queer woman who lived there in the 1800s.'

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