Gloria Muñoz
Author of
This is The Year (Holiday House, 2025)
Danzirly (University of Arizona Press, 2021)
Your Biome Has Found You (Finishing Line Press, 2017)
Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is currently working on This is the Year, a Young Adult hybrid novel. Muñoz is the author of Your Biome Has Found You and Danzirly (University of Arizona Press), which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Her other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, being a Macondista, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, a Las Musas Mentorship, and attending the Tin House YA writers workshop. Her writing has appeared in Puerto del Sol, VIDA Review, Acentos Review, Lumina, the Rumpus, Yes Poetry, Juke Joint, Best New Poets, Sweet, Burrow Press, Cosmonauts Avenue, Cagibi, and elsewhere. Through Moonlit Música, the company she cofounded, Muñoz writes and composes for bilingual children’s programming across audio and film networks.
Books by Gloria
This is the Year (Holiday House, 2025)
Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed Goth and wannabe writer Julieta is drowning. She is grieving her twin sister who died in a hit and run the year before, Florida is crumbling under the weight of climate disaster, and Juli isn’t sure how much longer she can stand to be in a place that doesn’t seem to have room for her. While planning her way out and away from her swampland state and everyone in it, a private space program recruits her for Cometa’s New American Initiative, a five-year program to look for new homes beyond their dying Earth. Juli begins her training in secret while trying to make peace with her mother and her estranged friend group. But her senior year is full of surprises including new friendships, a unforeseen appreciation for roller derby, and fresh love. Through her small but poignant acts of environmentalism and the time she spends caring for a tiny red-chested bird in a shoebox, Juli begins to find hope where there seemingly isn’t any.
In a world collapsing from the ramifications - both environmental and social - of the climate crisis, Juli has to decide if she’ll carry her loss together with her community or take on a new identity and leave it all behind. Through a contemporary YA voice, Muñoz offers readers a realistic and at times terrifying glimpse into our world’s future as our current climate crisis might unfold. Using the hybrid (poetry and prose) format to its full potential, Muñoz’s beautiful imagery vividly captures the internal conflict of so many young people who yearn to be away from this world, even as they find the beauty in it.
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