Dagoberto Gilb, of Anglo and Mexican heritage, calls both El Paso and Los Angeles home and is a union carpenter with a degree in philosophy. Gilb's rich experiences translate into stories that range the width of his native desert lands. He has been called "a powerful, necessary voice in American literature whose emergence defies any pigeon-holing." He is a winner of the James D. Phelan Award in Literature, the Whiting Award, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. He is the author of The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna and  The Magic of Blood, stories which Jim Harrison said: "deal with a portion of society that literature seldom ever reaches."

Howard Junker is the founding editor & publisher of ZYZZYVA, a quarterly of West Coast writers and artists.

This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The media has been digitized with minor edits.