¡Hola! !Bienvenidos, colegas y amigos!
Where should I begin? Well, first of all, since I don’t want to bore you, I won’t begin by uploading my curriculum vitae as if I were applying for a position at a university or bank, but I do want to provide enough of my background—academic, literary, and personal—so you can decide whether any of my work and that of my colleagues might be of interest to you. While I am trying to establish myself among you as an author, I am more interested in the grand conversation—or discourse, to use a loftier word— that occurs between an author and his readers than in mere self-promotion. I am especially interested in connecting with friends and readers in Laredo, TX, which has served not only the setting for much of my work but also its inspiration. With your help I hope to reach readers beyond our region and provide them a nuanced understanding and appreciation of the Texas-Mexico border.
El Paso, Laredo, and San Ygnacio
Though born and raised in El, Paso, TX, I have lived and worked in Laredo since 1970. Soon, however, I will be moving to San Ygnacio, TX, a small village thirty miles south of the Laredo on U.S. Highway 83, on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. San Ygnacio is one of a handful of such towns that survived the construction of Falcon Dam, twenty miles south of us on the river, and the creation of Lake Falcon, which inundated Zapata Viejo, San Bartolo, and Guerrero Viejo. Named for the prominent Spanish saint, Ignatius of Loyola, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as San Ygnacio Historic District. My homepage photograph shows my family and me walking along Uribe Street, past the old fort where the colonists once took refuge from marauding Comanches, bandits, and Mexican revolutionaries. My wife and I will be living in a 100-year-old house across the street from the fort.
Current Projects
Now that I am writing full-time, I hope to achieve the life-long dream of writing and publishing a book a year. Here is an update. First, The Pillars of Creation, a short experimental novel about a young South Texas Chicano trying to find a spiritual path amid the cartel violence on the border while he attempts to help rescue a young woman fleeing the cartels, is under consideration at a university press in Texas. The second edition of Our House on Hueco, a YA novel about growing up in El Paso, originally published by Texas Tech University Press in 2013, will be released as an e-book under a new imprint. My assistant and technical advisor, Christopher Stewart, a librarian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and I are seriously considering self-publishing A Ganglion of Seeds and Other Stories, a short collection of short stories I wrote in my mid-twenties; it served as my master’s thesis at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Since retiring about year ago, I knocked out a collection of short stories, Dantesque Crimes and Other Tales of Mexican Horror; I have begun polishing them and may soon publish them individually. Moreover, I have begun writing a new novel, Cocula, a romance set in the El Paso-Cd. Juarez border region; it is inspired by Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Finally, I hope to promote my second published novel, Sex as a Political Condition: A Border Novel, a ribald satire of the male condition at the end of the Cold War. Check out Hollie Dykstra’s book review, “The Degradation of Man: Ridiculousness and the Search for Honor [in] Flores’ Sex as a Political Condition.” (Continued on http://carlosfloresauthor.com/index.php/2021/07/19/blog-post-with-the-rest-of-the-bio/.)
Laredo, Texas