Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and gender discrimination.



Cristina Rivera Garza is a Mexican writer and historian. She earned an undergraduate degree in sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a doctorate in history at the University of Houston. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Liliana’s Invincible Summer in 2024 in the category of memoir or autobiography. She has taught at various universities in Mexico and the United States and currently holds the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and serves as the director and founder of the creative writing program in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Rivera Garza began writing in her youth and published her first book, The War Doesn’t Matter, in 1991, shortly after Ángel Gonzales Ramos murdered her sister, Liliana. The unpublished manuscript won the San Luis Potosí National Short Story Award, an accomplishment woven into the narrative of her memoir as she recollects Liliana’s presence in the text: “When, two years later, the book launch was held at El Cuervo, a bar in the center of the Coyocán district in the south of the city [Mexico City], Liliana was not there.