Javier Sandoval grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico, but later immigrated to Wisconsin (where his mother sent him to kindergarten every day in a cowboy hat), Texas (falling for its blues), then North Carolina (living in a shelter for three years). After consulting minority-owned businesses and building a startup invested in by Microsoft, he received Brown University’s full-ride Leadership Endowed Award, where he studied computer science alongside creative writing under Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, and John Wideman. He then managed tech teams and performed standup in Seattle, until the pandemic when he became a Graduate Council Fellow at the University of Alabama’s MFA program, where he taught and edited Black Warrior Review. Now he’s an Appleby Fellow at the University of Georgia’s English PhD program, specializing in Indigenous, Latino, and Black literatures/films, and eating all the local barbecue.

His first book, the literary gang-thriller Cicada, Ladybug (Thought Catalog Books), was a Top 20 Amazon Best Seller in Hispanic-American fiction, and his magical-realist sitcom pilot Fare Well was a finalist for the Sundance Cultural Impact Residency. A Top Ten Debut by Latino Stories, his chapbook Blue Moon Looming (CutBank Books) was praised by National Book Award nominee José Olivarez as ‘poetry for the unruly, and yes, the brilliant among us.’

His work appears in Best American Poetry, Missouri Review, Narrative, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Five Points, Salamander, Indiana Review, and Post Road. He’s been a finalist for awards from Iowa Review, Pinch, and Ninth Letter, the recipient of swamp pink’s Indigenous Writers Prize and Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize, and a fellow for Tin House and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

But mostly, he loves to smoke on the stoop with his lady: graphic novelist and writer, Kalie Boyne.

You can follow him on IG at @JavierWantsCandy for tips, recommendations, and the occasional rant about language & snacks.