Francisco Cantú

Biography

Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River (Riverhead, 2018). A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and an Art for Justice fellowship. His writing and translations appear in the New Yorker, Best American Essays 2016, and Harper’s, as well as on This American Life. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 2020

Sounds of Nepantla

By Francisco Cantú ,  Illustration by Magnus Voll Mathiassen

Where Selena Found Her Voice
ESSAYS / Summer 2020

Murmurs on the Plain

By Francisco Cantú ,  Illustration by Abigail Piña Rocha Carlisle

Rulfo’s literary reputation rests on just two slim books—the short story collection El Llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames), first published in 1953, and the novel Pedro Páramo, released two years later. Pedro Páramo would arguably go on...
ESSAYS / Spring 2020

Lines of  Sight

By Francisco Cantú

The town of Dunwich, once a thriving medieval port on England’s Suffolk Coast, has for centuries been crumbling into the sea. All that now remains of the old structures is a small collection of hilltop ruins, flanked by a nineteenth-century...

Lisa Golightly, <em>Flood Line 575</em>, 2015.