Martha Cecilia Rivera

Martha Cecilia Rivera writes literary, philosophical fiction that is unafraid to take risks. She retells and interrogates the great inventions of the human race, its religions, its histories, its arts, and the dilemmas of everyday life, turning them over with a sharp eye, a sense of humor, and a gift for the question that unsettles. Her work asks readers to think, and rewards them for it.

Her novel The Gatekeeper, the first book in the Stroboscope series, reimagines Saint Peter as the weary keeper of heaven's gate, whose machine for judging the dead turns without warning upon his own life. Her earlier novel La fatalidad de la gallina (Ars Comunis Editorial, 2018) took Second Place at the North Texas Book Festival in 2019, and her first novel, Ghosts for Long Nights, appeared with Comun Presencia Publishers in 2014. Her poem "Bretch Steps" opened the International Poetry Festival "Juarez Solidarity" in 2015.

She is also the author of the microfiction stories collections The Book of Ironies and The Book of Surprises, with a third, The Book of People, on the way. Across the novel and the very short story alike, her readers describe the same experience: the recognition of something that was always there, in plain sight, unseen until she recreated it on the page and opened a whole new world of surprise and rethinking.