Initiated in 1988, UC Riverside's annual Tomás Rivera Conference honors the enduring legacy of Tomás Rivera, activist, educator, writer, and the first Chicano chancellor of the UC system. 

This virtual conference runs from April 20 to May 11, 2022.

Register and browse the complete May schedule.

Upcoming:

May 11, 11 a.m.

Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, which “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, and Agni, among others. She received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. A VONA alum, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

May 11, 1 p.m.

Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Guernica, among others. He has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. Navarro Aquino is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches in the MFA program.

May 11, 3 p.m.

Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, California. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and is the recipient of a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship. She is the founder of Makara Center for the Arts, a nonprofit library in her hometown. She is the author of Maria, Maria and Other Stories (Liveright, Apr 2022). 

May 11, 5 p.m.

Debut Authors Spotlight features the three authors discussing their experiences writing and publishing their first books. 

Register and browse the complete May schedule.