On Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski

Alexai grew up and still lives in a Chicago neighborhood known as Pilsen/Little Village. It's the largest barrio east of L.A. The neighborhood is the locus of Mexican culture in the Midwest. It is plagued by the usual economic problems that plague most immigrations, and in particular by street gangs.

What attracts me to Alexai's writing is its humanity and its authenticity. I know the neighborhood and he gets it right, but I don't mean authentic merely in terms of streets, slang, and folkways; I mean authentic in terms of the literary tradition that he's writing in—one senses the great Chicago writers of neighborhood behind this—Algren and James Farrell. Algren especially because of the humor, the vivid details, and the vitality. The writing, thanks to the authentic voice, has a natural—even a rough—quality of anecdotes strung together. The voice serves as the raconteur, the storyteller, but beneath the voice there is the writer creating form and resonance so that the final effect of the story is far greater than the sum of its anecdotes.

It won't be long before he has a book, I think, and will no longer qualify as emerging. This is a good time, an exciting time early in what will be a career, to catch a young writer with a genuine voice.

—Stuart Dybek, author of the story collections The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and other Neighborhoods, the forthcoming novel-in-stories I Sailed With Magellan, and a collection of poetry, Brass Knuckles.