Alicia Gaspar de Alba has won numerous awards for her fiction, poetry and essays, including the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Book Award for [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman” (2015), the El Paso Community College Literary Legacy Award (2014), the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery for Desert Blood (2005), the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award for Best Historical Fiction for Sor Juana’s Second Dream (2000) and the Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Premio Aztlán for Emerging Chicano/a Fiction Writers (1994). She has published more than a dozen books with mainstream, academic and independent presses. She has been a professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, English and Gender Studies at UCLA since 1994, and resides in Los Angeles, California, with her wife and daughter.