Yxta Maya Murray – författare

What It Takes to Get to Vegas has been described by The Arizona Republic as "a juicy tale of ambition, passion and grit that is as much fun to read as a good trash talk session with your best friend." Growing up among the championship hopefuls and alleyway gladiators of East L.A., Rita Zapata sees in boxing a ticket to something better. At eighteen, she's earned the title "Queen of the Streetfighters." Then she meets Billy, an enigmatic, intense fighter from Mexico, who begins systematically clawing his way to the top. Their passionate connection gives Rita two things she's never had: real love, and respect in the neighborhood. From the alleys off Cesar Chavez Avenue to the carpeted suites of Caesars Palace, Rita learns exactly what it takes to get to Vegas, as Billy turns out to be the best thing that has ever happened to her -- and the worst. In exuberant prose sparkling with wicked wit, Yxta Maya Murray has given us a sass-talking, big-hearted heroine with a story we will not soon forget. "Frenetic, bittersweet, and often hilarious ... Rita Zapata is who Holden Caulfield would want to be if he were alive in 1999." -- The Boston Globe; "From the get-go, [Yxta Maya Murray] pulls you into her latest book with its flowing Spanglish and bittersweet observations." -- Seventeen; "Somewhere between a telenovela and the passion of St. Theresa de Avila ... precise, hilarious, and swinging ... Rita's world dance[s] around beside us after we put the book down." -- New Times LA; "Murray's elegant prose beckons those who fear this land of urban blight to venture into it, to stay a while and meet its citizens ... Stellar." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xochitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda's grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she's going to film a groundbreaking auto-critical documentary in Mexico.But then everything starts to fall apart when Xochitl's biological clock begins beeping, Amanda's father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodesust as she has a breakthrough.

An artful and gripping new novel that recounts the human and environmental damage caused by actual disasters in Simi Valley, CaliforniaIn award-winning legal scholar and novelist Yxta Maya Murray’s new novel, federal agent Reyna Rodriguez reports on a real-life nuclear reactor meltdown and accidents that occurred in 1959, 1964, and 1968 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. An infamous research and development complex in California’s Simi Valley, the lab was eventually dismantled by the US government—but not before it created a toxic legacy of contamination and numerous cancer clusters. Toxins and nuclear residue may have been further released by the 2018 Woolsey Fire and 2019 floods in the area.God Went Like That takes the form of an EPA report in which Reyna presents riveting interviews with individuals affected by the disasters. With imagination and artistry, Murray brings to life an actual 2011 Department of Energy dossier that detailed the catastrophes and the ensuing public health fallout and highlights the high costs of governmental malfeasance and environmental racism.

We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action "artivism" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists —Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown—and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.

We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action "artivism" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists —Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown—and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.

Laura de León is a radar astronomer who studies Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs) such as threatening asteroids and comets at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. In Los Angeles in 2020, several crises are coalescing. The first strain of SARS-CoV-2 triggers the lockdowns, the city roils with protests of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd and the police killing of Breonna Taylor, while the Bobcat Fire sweeps across the San Fernando Valley. In the midst of these emergencies, Laura is struggling to keep her family alive.Simultaneously, Laura is trying to write the history section of a Congressional report titled the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan. This report will advise Congress that it must develop a system to detect and deflect PHOs, and the section Laura is working on cites several historical meteorite impacts as proof that the Earth is now undefended against a significant impact event.A story about family, love, risk, and science, A History of Hazardous Objects contemplates how experiencing trauma and pain may help us secure a safer and more just world.

One of the Best Books of 2020, Buzzfeed NewsThe Millions' Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half of 2020 Book Preview The gripping, thought-provoking stories in Yxta Maya Murray’s latest collection find their inspiration in the headlines. Here, ordinary people negotiate tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. A nurse volunteers to serve in catastrophe-stricken Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and discovers that her skill and compassion are useless in the face of stubborn governmental inertia. An Environmental Protection Agency employee, whose agricultural-worker parents died after long exposure to a deadly pesticide, finds herself forced to find justifications for reversing regulations that had earlier banned the chemical. A Department of Education employee in a dystopic future America visits a highly praised charter school and discovers the horrific consequences of academic failure. A transgender trainer of beauty pageant contestants takes on a beautiful Latina contender for Miss USA and brings her to perfection and the brink of victory, only to discover that she has a fatal secret. These characters grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes and policies pervasive in the United States today. Murray not only explores our distressing human capacity for moral numbness in the face of evil but also reveals our surprising stores of compassion and forgiveness. These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written stories are troubling yet irresistible mirrors of our time.