Dagoberto Gilb Papers

Writer Dagoberto Gilb was born in Los Angeles. Gilb graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1973 with a double major in Philosophy and Religious Studies. In 1976, he earned a master's degree in Religious Studies.

After a career as a carpenter and a journeyman. Gilb got his first break when Wendy Lesser of the The Threepenny Review agreed to publish one of his stories in 1992. Over the next decade, Gilb published stories with increasing frequency and he also received occasional appointments as a writer-in-residence at colleges and universities. After winning California's James D. Phelan Award in 1984, Gilb was solicited for a book by a friend in El Paso. In 1985 a collection of Gilb's stories,Winners on the Pass Line, became the first publication issued by Cinco Puntos Press. In 1988 Gilb received a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Gilb a fellowship for Creative Writing.

His next publication was The Magic of Blood. which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award given for the best fiction of the year. It also earned Gilb the PEN Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for the best first fiction, the Jesse Jones Award for best book of fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Whiting Writer's Award.

Gilb's novel The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna was published by Grove Press in 1994. The national recognition continued to pour in and the novel was named a New York Times Notable Book. In 1995 Gilb received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two of his stories appeared in the Best American Essays collections.

Dagoberto Gilb currently teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at Texas State University and he resides in Austin, Texas