Rebecca Balcarcel

Rebecca Balcárcel is a Guatemalan–Anglo American author and poet whose middle-grade novel The Other Half of Happy received a Pura Belpré Author Honor, as well as recognition as an ALSC Notable Book and multiple awards from the Texas Institute of Letters. She is also the author of Shine On, Luz Véliz!, a critically acclaimed middle-grade novel published in 2022, and has written poetry and prose including Palabras in Each Fist and the chapbook Ferry Crossing.

Balcárcel serves as an Associate Professor of English at Tarrant County College, where she teaches and supports community college students. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was awarded the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. In addition to her novels, she co-edited and contributed to Boundless: Twenty Stories from Multiracial/cultural Authors, a short story anthology featuring multiracial and multicultural voices.