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Dagoberto Gilb is an American writer born in Los Angeles, California, whose reputation, after years between L.A. and Texas, is as one of the leading voices from the American Southwest.

Gilb was born in Los Angeles. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees. Gilb embarked on a career in construction, became a journeyman carpenter and joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners in Los Angeles.

Gilb was born to a mother born in Mexico who came across the border illegally, while his father was born in Kentucky. Both, however, were raised in Los Angeles from a young age, his mother in downtown LA, his father in Boyle Heights, where he learned Spanish. The two divorced when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother. His father worked for 49 years in an industrial laundry, where he became the floor supervisor. His mother was a model in her early years, then became a dental assistant, until she remarried two more times.[1]

Gilb began working at thirteen as a sheet shaker, then found jobs as a janitor and a factory shipping clerk. After high school, he went to several community colleges, working full-time as a paper cutter and as a stockboy in a major department store. He finally transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated in 1974 with a double major in Philosophy and Religious Studies, remaining there until he also received M.A. in Religious Studies in 1976.

From 1976-79 Gilb worked in many areas of the construction trades to make his living, as a laborer, stone mason, and carpenter. A new father, by 1979 he had joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners, and he worked as a journeyman until 1992. Though he did all facets of carpentry work, his main employment was as class-A high-rise.

Contents 1 Writing career 2 Awards 3 Books 4 Selected works 5 References 6 Notes

[edit] Writing career

While completing a never-published novel, in 1977 he was working on a three-story addition to the mueum at the University of Texas at El Paso when he learned of the writer Raymond Carver, who was teaching across the campus street, only at the beginning of his national acclaim. Gilb turned to short stories, and he began publishing in 1982. The first bound work of his own was a chapbook-sized collection, Winners on the Pass Line (1985), also the first by El Paso's Cinco Puntos Press. His first full book of stories (35 had been published in magazines by then) was The Magic of Blood (1993), with the University of New Mexico Press. The stories are populated by working men, Mexican American, who live in the Southwest. It won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Jesse Jones Texas Institute of Letters Award, and was a PEN Faulkner finalist.

More books followed, all published in New York by Grove Press: a novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), about a drifter living at a financial border as a resident of a YMCA on the El Paso border; a collection of short fiction, Woodcuts of Women (2001), stories of men obsessed with women; a collection of nonfiction essays, Gritos (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, collecting Gilb's nonfiction essays as a construction worker, a writer, a teacher, and a parent; an anthology, Hecho en Tejas (2006), winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award, now the canonical work of record for Mexican American literature in Texas; and the novel The Flowers (2008), an urban survival tale of a Chicano becoming a man in a city on the verge of a white-and-black race riot.

Gilb has also worked on a few movies and documentaries and spent several years writing commentaries which aired on the NPR show Fresh Air. In 1997, he accepted a job teaching in the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University. In September 2009, Gilb joined the faculty of the University of Houston–Victoria as a writer-in-residence and a professor of Latino studies.^[1]

[edit] Awards

Gilb has been honored by many state and national prizes, including a James D. Phelan Award (1984), a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship (1987), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1992), the Whiting Writer's Award (1993), the El Paso Writers' Hall of Fame (1995), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1995), and the Bookend Award from the Texas Book Festival (2007).

[edit] Books

• Winners on the Pass Line and Other Stories, 1985
• The Magic of Blood, 1993
• The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, 1994
• Woodcuts of Women, 2001
• Gritos, 2003
• Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, 2006
• The Flowers, 2008

[edit] Selected works

• "Down in the West Texas Town" Puerto del Sol, Spring 1982
• "Where the Sun Don't Shine" The Threepenny Review, Fall 1983
• "Look on the Bright Side" The Pushcart Prize XVII: Best of the Small Presses, 1992
• "Poverty Is Always Starting Over" Fresh Air, July 26, 1994
• "María de Covina The New Yorker, September 29, 1997
• "Northeast Direct" The Best American Essays 1997
• "Victoria" The Best American Essays 1999,
• "I Knew She Was Beautiful" The New Yorker, March 13, 2000
• "Work Is Good" Carpenter, September/October 2000
• "Romero's Shirt" Still Wild, 2000
• "Pride" The Texas Observer, May 24, 2001
• "Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes" Harper's Magazine, June 2001
• "Documenting the Undocumented" The Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2001
• "About Tere Who Was in Palomas" Pushcart Prize Stories XXVI: Best of the Small Presses, 2001
• "Sentimental for Steinbeck" The New York Times, March 18, 2002
• "Spanish Guy" The New Yorker, April 22 & 29, 2002
• "You Know Him by His Labors" The Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2004
• "Willows Village" Harper's Magazine, September 2008
• "Love In L.A."

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

• "Dagoberto Gilb." Writers Directory, 24th ed. St. James Press, 2008.
• "Dagoverto Gilb." Grove Press [2]