Lady without Land

Winner of The 2023 George Garrett Fiction Prize, selected by Manuel Muñoz as seen here.

Winner of a 2025 International Latino Book Award/Silver Medal for The Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Fiction Book Award as seen here.

Finalist for Foreword INDIES LGBTQ+ Fiction Award

Finalist for Eric Hoffer Award - Fiction

Finalist for Last Syllable Lit Fiction Award

Nora de Hoyos Comstock Best First Book Honorable Mention

International Latino Book Awards Best Immigration Themed Book Honorable Mention

Lady without Land is a story told in fragments about señorita who feels lost in and lost without Los Angeles.

She uses classic literature and cocktail recipes to organize and populate bits and pieces of a life: growing up as a Mexican middle-class girl in a predominantly white suburb where neighbors labeled her family the “dirty” Mexicans; being bullied by an older sister on car rides from Los Angeles to Mexico, grappling with a father’s gambling addiction, and, later, his death; journeying on the continuous carousel of lovers the Pacific and Atlantic coasts have to offer.

A shaken and stirred abecedarian, a sloppy yet put-together künstlerroman, about charting one’s life path amid cultural pressures and the grip of the ever-present past, the book can be read forwards or backwards and, with any hope, completely out of sequence so that no reader can read this novel the same way twice.