Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Cristina Rivera Garza for Autobiography of Cotton

“A sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighboring nations. In dense, lyrical prose, Rivera Garza weaves in an array of political and historical allusions, highlighting the human costs and environmental degradation caused by the cash crop that created our modern world.” — Time, “The 36 Most Anticipated Books of 2026”

“A historical novel braided with deep personal narrative and research, creating something unique and almost indefinable.”—Literary Hub, ”Most Anticipated Books of 2026”

“Cristina Rivera Garza—mythmaker, archivist, historiographer, etymologist, and philosopher—reveals the blood-soaked blossom between parallel histories. Rooted in careful research, Autobiography of Cotton is a triumph of the critical and speculative imagination.”—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Cristina Rivera Garza, comes the Autobiography of Cotton: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney.

In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which became the basis of his landmark novel Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas’s life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. Deeply personal and politically acute, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped develop. An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the University of Houston's PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish.

Christina MacSweeney is the award-winning literary translator of works by Julian Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and Elvira Navarro. She received the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Veronica Gerber Bicecci's The Company.