JM Rivera
Associate Professor
PWR & English

Areas of Interest: Latino Culture, Creative Nonfiction, Experimental Compositions, Information Studies, Critical Race Studies

John-Michael Rivera is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he serves as Director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and is a member of the English Department. His first book, The Emergence of Mexican America (NYU Press, 2007), won the Thomas J. Lyon Best Book Award, and his second book, UNDOCUMENTS (U of Arizona Press, 2020) won the 2021 Kayden Book Award. He has edited, introduced, and translated two books for the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and has published widely in criticism, memoir, creative nonfiction, poetry, and scholarship. He is the curator of El Laboratorio, a literary space for Latinx writers, and CrossBorders, an international collective of writers and artists engaging borders.  He was the co-founder of Shadowbox Magazine, a literary journal for creative nonfiction and has also served as the editor of ELN, English Language Notes. He is currently working on two manuscripts. The first book, Recoil, is a new materialist, cross genre study of American gun culture and focuses on three liminal moments, the Conquest of the Americas, the US-Mexico War and the El Paso Mass Shooting in order to explore the central role that Latinx culture has played in the constitution of American gun culture. The second work, Thirteen Strikes of the Clock, locates the gothic dimensions of Greater Mexican temporality.