Overview

A young man must decide what's most important when violence breaks out at a drag club. A pizza delivery driver has a fateful encounter with a voracious customer at the end of the world. And a graduate student must face his childhood trauma while being treated by a sadistic dental trainee. In Mexican Teeth, Tomás Hulick Baiza introduces readers to characters who slowly unravel what their lives mean to themselves and those around them. Baiza challenges readers to consider what it means to be ""Mexican"" in the U.S., why characters should be allowed to speak in more than one language, and whether it's possible for anyone to identify as only one thing. With a sharp blend of surrealism, melancholy, and humor, Baiza's stories and essays explore the complex nature of Chicanx identity while emphasizing the universal conditions that unite us all. Tomás Hulick Baiza is originally from San José, California, and now finds himself in Boise, Idaho. He is the author of the novel, Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery (Running Wild Press, 2023), and the mixed-genre collection A Purpose to Our Savagery (RIZE Press, 2023). Delivery was selected as the 2024 Treasure Valley Reads featured novel. Tomás is the winner of the 2024 Eliud Martínez Prize for his manuscript Mexican Teeth (Inlandia Books, 2025), and his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net, and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Tomás has fenced in Italy, been rescued by helicopter from the Sierra Nevada, fended off wild dogs while hitchhiking in rural Morelos, México, and once delivered a dozen pizzas to a Klingon-themed orgy at a sci-fi convention. When he is not writing, Tomás is running trails, sharpening knives, or obsessing over bonsai trees.

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9781955969567

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Reviews

Have you ever been poor enough that you were forced to visit a student dentist? Well, Tomás Baiza's story about that visit is painful, scary, hilarious, and incredibly vulnerable. This entire book is vulnerable and powerful in equal measure. Read it! -Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Reservation Blues, and You Don't Have To Say You Love Me Baiza's writing speaks to me the same way some of my favorite writers did at first read, writers like Sandra Cisneros and Junot Diaz. MEXICAN TEETH is the kind of book that will make you swoon from the first story to the last. The writing stays with you and is bold yet tender and completely unique. There is no voice like Baiza's out there and it cuts through. -Juanita E. Mantz (JEM), author of Tales of an Inland Empire Girl and Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender, or How I Became a Punk Rock Lawyer Tomás Baiza is an agile writer, using fiction, fantasy, poetry, and hybrid forms to create a contemporary chronicle of characters traversing the uneasy borderlands between identities. Poignant, flawed and funny, the characters in MEXICAN TEETH are contested at every turn-as Chicanos, as multiracial people, as queers, and as working-class people navigating academia. They stumble, they get lost, they do the exact wrong thing, and they soldier on. -Jaime Cortez, author of Gordo

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