writer-IN-RESIDENCE
February 3 – 21, 2025
Ciara Alfaro
Ciara Alfaro is a Chicana writer, romantic, and descendant of magicians from Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, Swamp Pink, Best American Essays, and more. She is the winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2022 PhotoFinish Contest, a 2023 AWP Intro Journals Prize, and Southeast Review’s 2024 Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Ciara has received support from Colgate University, Hedgebrook, and the Anderson Center. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.
Artist Statement
In my own practice, writing has extended beyond the point of transcription into an act of conjuring. I feel particularly drawn towards writing community—my childhood wolf-boy cousins, my folktale-loving girlhood clique, my relationship across time with ancestors that I’ve never met. While at Good Hart, I will expand my memoir manuscript. It is a queer Chicana story about reckoning with desire and identity amongst the sharp contradictions of Lubbock, Texas—a place where I grew up around gorgeous Mexican girlhood, stifling conservatism, and legacies of my own curandero magician ancestors lurking around every bend. In this memoir, I journey through generations of family to understand what it means to come from a magician legacy and not know how to perform miracles myself. Ultimately, I hope to explore what it is to conjure ghosts, and how we might create fortunes from them.
Community Engagement
