Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of Death Takes Me, The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir Liliana's Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD programme in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.