by Loria Mendoza, winner of the 2016 MRBA

 

"There's a ferocious honesty in Loria Mendoza's work that we don't have nearly enough of these days. No posturing here. No dressing anything up to make it something it isn't. And she asks the questions we all ask but maybe don't always articulate out loud. 'But who's to say what love is?' a character asks. 'For all I know it's the cyst in my cheekbone throbbing under my fingertips.' That about says it, doesn't it? Life's Too Short is a no-holds-bar collection of hard-won truth. And did I mention it's funny as hell?"

-- Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here?

 

Loria Mendoza hails from Austin, Texas, where she learned to keep it weird. Seeking the constancy of the bizarre, she moved to the Mission District in San Francisco, where she earned her MFA in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Mobius, Subprimal, Maudlin House, Red Light Lit, The Walrus Literary Journal, Transfer Magazine, and featured at Voz Sin Tinta, Bay Area Generations, Pan Dulce Poets, MFA Mixer 2.0, Velro, Oakland’s Beast Crawl and San Francisco’s Litquake. She lives in Austin, again.

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