Josh Galarza

Josh Galarza is a longtime Montessori educator, writer, and multidisciplinary visual artist from Nevada, specializing in printmaking and book arts. His debut young adult novel, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (Henry Holt and Company, 2024), was named a 2024 National Book Award finalist for Young People’s Literature and selected for the Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce YA program and the Kids’ Next List. The novel also received the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Galarza’s fiction and creative nonfiction often engage with male gender performance, queer issues, body liberation, and Chicano issues.

Galarza holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and both a BA in English and BFA in art from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he has taught printmaking and, at VCU, creative writing. His work has appeared in Folio and in Always Lost: A Meditation on War, a literary art exhibition that toured the United States. He is currently on the faculty of the **Creative Writing & Literature for Educators MA program at