Montoya Receives American Book Award

Interview with Professor Maceo Montoya, winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation 

Professor Maceo Montoya is a California-based writer and visual artist who teaches courses in both Chicana/o Studies and English. His work spans fiction, nonfiction, and collaborative visual-textual projects, and he is the author of multiple books, including The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, and You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories. His most recent work in collaboration with poet Javier O. Huerta, Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with 21st Century Latinx Authors, won a 2025 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. 

In this interview, Professor Montoya shares the creative workings behind Imaginative Possibilities, reflects on the collaborative nature of the process, and recounts his reaction to receiving the American Book Award. 

What were your first thoughts when you learned Imaginative Possibilities had received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation? What does this recognition mean to you personally and professionally? 

It takes so long to write a book, and a long time to publish it, and then it’s out in the world and it’s hard to know the impact it’s having, if any. So it was a thrill to get this recognition, but it was also a relief. It meant the book had been read, and maybe this award will mean more readers will find it. Of course, Javier and I didn’t write Imaginative Possibilities to make a splash. We understood it as a record of a particular time in a literary community’s history, and that alone made the project worthwhile. I should add that my late brother Andrés Montoya won the American Book Award for his poetry collection the iceworker sings. He died before it was published and so it entered the world without him. Our family didn’t know if anyone was reading it beyond those who knew and loved him. The award gave us hope that his words would live on. This was twenty-five years ago, and his book is still read and is now viewed as a classic of Chicano poetry.

How did your collaboration with Javier O. Huerta come about? What was the most rewarding or surprising aspect of co-authoring this project? Did you find that your own creative practices - as a writer and artist - influenced how you approached dialogue, form, or structure in this book? 

Javier and I have been having conversations about Latinx literature for many years. His book American Copia: An Immigrant Epic is one of my favorite works of literature, mainly because I had never read a book with so many inside references (inside jokes, really) about my own cultural and literary tradition. Javier has been instrumental in helping me understand and articulate what it means to work within a tradition, which is different from a cultural heritage. You inherit the latter, but a tradition requires mapping, charting, investigating, archiving, and above all articulating. A lot of this can happen on a subconscious level, but at some point, a tradition must be claimed, like placing a pin on a map. Imaginative Possibilities emerged out of those discussions but also out of that understanding. We were aware of how Latinx authors had articulated their positions in the past, our question was how Latinx authors were articulating their positions now.

Javier and I approached this project as creative practitioners, as artists first and foremost, and I think the authors we interviewed largely saw us as peers, which helped set a different tone for the conversation. We made the decision to keep our first names in the interviews, which is a small but significant detail: it felt strange to disappear behind the role of “interviewer” because the spirit of the conversations was so much more personal and intimate. But honestly, the most rewarding part of this project was driving to Berkeley every week to meet up with Javier and have these discussions over coffee and a meal. Javier remains an enigmatic figure to me despite being his friend for close to fifteen years now. There are two topics that seem to put him at ease: literature and basketball, and we weren’t going to write a book about basketball.

Imaginative Possibilities brings together many different U.S. Latinx writers. What guided your selection of these voices? Are there particular conversations that have stayed with you or moments that changed how you think about writing? What role do you see imagination playing in shaping contemporary Latinx literature?

Latinx is a broad umbrella term, so we knew from the outset that it was impossible to capture every voice. We tried to be cognizant of important trends in Latinx literature more so than strict categories—the centrality of queer voices, the increasing visibility of Afro-Latinx, Central American, and undocumented voices. Some decisions were more arbitrary—twenty-one authors for the twenty-first century, for instance. Some of the decisions were made for us: writers who didn’t have the time, never got back to us, or we couldn’t get past their agents. There were two earlier interview collections that influenced our process—Juan Bruce-Novoa’s Chicano Authors: An Inquiry and Frederick Luis Aldama’s Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia—and, as the titles indicate, those books focused exclusively on Chicanx authors. We might be two Chicanos from California and our network of writer friends skews toward that community, but our creative trajectories have included many important exchanges with writers across the Latinx diaspora and we wanted the book to reflect that.

We conducted the interviews on Zoom during the pandemic, and the lockdown was very fresh in our mind. We decided to begin our conversations by asking the authors how the pandemic had affected their creative process. I think the question disarmed the authors and they opened up in very moving ways about loss, about their mental health, their creative struggles, about what really mattered to them. As far as its impact on my own writing, it was clear that for so many the pandemic was an inflection point. I heard writers reflecting and taking stock of their creative lives and then being very intentional about what kind of artist they wanted to be moving forward. It was inspiring to hear. I understood that not only was it possible to rethink or reenvision the kind of artist you are but that it was necessary. I’ve been pondering what this means for my work ever since.

The imaginative possibilities that the title refers to is that leap, often spurred by a book or a mentor, when someone first sees themselves as an artist—the moment that unlocks everything. One thing our interviews show is that unlocking these imaginative possibilities is just as important for the mature artist. It’s what keeps our work from becoming stagnant or stale, but on a more fundamental level, it’s also what makes it exciting to be an artist, the idea that at any moment you can come across a sentence, an image, a flash of really anything and it can spark a whole new way of thinking and being.