This is the Year (Holiday House, 2025)

This dazzling YA cli-fi written in prose and verse will speak to any reader struggling with the state of our world and how to understand their place in it.

"In outer space, no one will know me as the girl with the dead sister."

Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed Goth and aspiring writer Julieta Villarreal is drowning. She’s grieving her twin sister who died in a hit-and-run, her Florida home is crumbling under the weight of climate disaster, and she isn’t sure how much longer she can stand to stay in a place that doesn’t seem to have room for her.

Then, Juli is recruited by Cometa, a private space program enlisting high-aptitude New American teens for a high-stakes mission to establish humanity’s first extraterrestrial settlement. Cometa pitches this as an opportunity for Juli to give back to her adopted country; Juli sees it as her only chance to do something big with her life.

Juli begins her training, convinced Cometa is her path to freedom. But her senior year is full of surprises, including new friendships, roller skating, and first love. And through her small but poignant acts of environmentalism, Juli begins to find hope in unexpected places. As her world collapses from the ramifications of the climate crisis, Juli must decide if she’ll carry her loss together with her community or leave it all behind.

Told in gripping prose interspersed with poems from Juli’s writing journal, this genre-bending novel explores themes of immigration, climate justice, grief, and the power of communities.

Danzirly (University of Arizona Press, 2021)

Danzirly is a striking bilingual poetry collection that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States. With a backdrop of stringent immigration policies, the #MeToo movement, and the increasingly tangible threat of climate change, this collection considers multigenerational Latinx identities in a rapidly changing country and world. Through the author’s Colombian American lens, the poems explore the intersections of culture, gender, history, and intergenerational grief.

Danzirly does not shy away from confronting traditional gender roles, religion, and anxieties surrounding climate change and the digital age. Gloria Muñoz addresses Latinx stereotypes and powerfully dismantles them in poetic form, juxtaposing the promised wonders of a life in America with the harsh realities that immigrants face as they build their lives and raise their families here. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, this collection of poems is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

Praise for Danzirly:

“Somewhere between dazzling and dawn is a mondegreen that confuses survival and desire, love and devastation. Gloria Muñoz has written a book that confronts the myths that raised her and the painful negotiations forced by nation, family, and institutions. These poems shelter their subjects, even as they undo the knotted entanglements that bring them together.”—Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario / the tertiary and while they sleep (under the bed is another country)

“Gloria Muñoz’s voice rings with an authenticity that occurs when tradition is brought into the service of intimate originality. What a joy to discover such an artist.”—Jay Hopler, author of The Abridged History of Rainfall

Your Biome Has Found You (Finishing Line Press, 2017)

“At times lyrical, at times narrative, the poems in Your Biome Has Found You happen at the turbulent crossing of self, family, and culture. They are works of both passion and compassion and they mark the debut of a writer for whom art and moral citizenship are, blessedly, synonymous.” –Jay Hopler

“The poems in this wonderful book make my heart hurt and make it sing, at once as elegies and love letters to her fellow humans tell the story of one woman’s coming of age in a broken-to-pieces world. Dreamy, crystal clear, engaged, vibrant and original.” –Heather Sellers