liz gonzalez

liz gonzález, a fourth generation Southern Californian, grew up in the San Bernardino Valley. She’s a funkifizer, animal and nature lover, writer, activist, and creative writing instructor and pusher.

liz is the author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, July 2018). She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and her work will appear or recently appeared in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, Inlandia: San Bernardino, the City of Los Angeles 2017 Latino Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide, Cultural Weekly, Voices from Leimert Park Anthology Redux, The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.

Her recent awards include a 2017 Residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and a 2017 Arts Council for Long Beach Professional Development Microgrant, both of which supported her research on her maternal grandfather’s childhood in the Midwest from 1911-1923.

Currently, liz lives in North Long Beach, California, with her fur buddies Chacho, a chi mix, and Espresso, a tortie, who keep her company while she’s writing, and Jorge Martin, a scientist and musician. She directs Uptown Word & Arts, promoting literacy and the arts in North Long Beach and beyond since 2015; is a member of Macondo Writers Workshop; and proudly serves on the Macondo 2018 Ad Hoc Advisory Board. She is a creative writing instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.