Gina María Balibrera Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Gina María Balibrera
Gina Maria Balibrera earned her MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she was also a postgraduate fellow. She has been awarded grants from the Rackham Institute, the Gould Center, the Aura Estrada Prize, a Tyson Award, the Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship.

Gina has always kinda known that she was a writer. The notebooks that she wrote in while she was a child she made certain to call “Journals” instead of diaries. She remembers one of her earliest, it was yellow and white striped, college ruled, with this sticker of an iridescent unicorn she slapped on the cover. Gina believes she got this sticker out of a gumball machine somewhere in Chinatown.

She was into calligraphy at the time, in kindergarten, the Spanish nuns nurtured her enthusiasm with old school zeal, however in first grade she changed schools and was forced to untrain her hand.

Her deepest darkest secrets and her darkest self was in a puffy pink plastic journal, since it had coded language, stories, and drawings, not just dirt. She remembers yanking out pages by the fistful this one day, using these kitchen scissors to ribbon them, and then scattering the remains in multiple different trash cans outside their apartment building, like you do with a credit card statement.

In high school, she and her friend Identified As Writers. They would sneer at everybody in their English classes and wrote a bunch of stories in comic book form, while her friend was much better than Gina at drawing the nonfiction creatures of their funny little life. At the age of 16 she was so moved by the precise and unhinged quality of TS Eliot and the other Modernist machismos, that she wrote a version of her own of “The Wasteland”. She was seriously aggrieved when it didn’t get published in her high school literary magazine.

As a young reader, she was inspired by writers that really announced themselves as practitioners of a craft, sometimes in a very cheesy way. She loved writers that she was exposed to in her high school classes, the typical AP English High Modernists, like “King Lear”.

She remembers seeking out Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”, on her high school writing teacher’s recommendation and being awed by its capaciousness and her youth.

Gina’s family roots stretch back to El Salvador, and she started writing a version of “The Volcano Daughters” way back in 2011, when she moved from San Francisco to Ann Arbor to earn her Master of Fine Arts degree. The novel’s unusual narrative voice, this collective of plural first person, or “choral voice”, which first took shape.

This use of a collective voice can be a fraught choice since it can be so easily rendered as being unified and flat, something meant to represent the voice of the state or some sort of unwavering authority. Which is something that she wanted to play with just a bit. Her narrator represents the voice of a collective of women, and the voice of sisters, of friends, all of whom are individuals. She wanted them to be able to talk back against what’s been written without any consultation from them.

While working on the novel, she also found she was pushing back both against other flawed depictions of Central America and the stereotypical magical realism that so often gets ascribed to Latin American literature.

“The Volcano Daughters” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2024. A searingly original story about art, sisterhood, and this community of women that refuse to be silenced.

Graciela (9 years old) grows up in the shadow of El Salvador’s Izalco volcano up until the day she gets taken to the capital city by the country’s fearsome, and fearsomely superstitious, dictator, that believes she is a muse capable of foreseeing the future.

It’s there that she meets Consuelo, the sister that she never even knew existed. Consuelo is everything that she isn’t: dreamy, teenaged, and volatile, but despite all of their differences, the sisters form this unlikely bond. Once the dictator’s brutality is unleashed finally, El Salvador is changed forever. Consuelo and Graciela survive the massacre, however much of their community are not so lucky.

From San Salvador to Los Angeles, Paris to San Francisco, these sisters create this new future for themselves. However the tale of those that they left behind has not ended. Their voices, formerly just a whimper, now shout louder than ever.

“The Volcano Daughters” was a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Electric Literature and Vulture.

This is a spellbinding and gripping novel about this sisterhood being ripped apart by violence, and narrated by this ghostly chorus.

Surprising, potent, and inventive, Gina gets you to fall under her spell right from the very first line and you are simply unable to look away. To pen a novel with this much heart, where every sentence feels as though it plumbs the darkest depths before soaring to the brightest of skies, you must be some kind of savant of the human heart.

This novel is sure to blow your mind with its rich humor, its gorgeous depiction of women’s lives, and its unstoppable plot, all of which is wrapped up in a narrative voice that you’ll follow anywhere.

Here is a novel that is a work of fierce ambition and blazing ambition, narrated by a chorus of ghosts tracing the tale of their friends through this journey which spans generations and continents. This is a haunted and haunting debut novel that is at once mythic and earthy, and stark and lush.

Each of her characters is brought to life vibrantly. Gina is an author of tremendous imagination that draws on her knowledge of two languages to craft a debut unlike any other.

The word makes the world and Gina proves this to be true. Her invocation of the voices of this group of women whose lives were cut short and distorted by El Gran Pendejo (El Salvador’s violent dictator) leaves readers breathless, and is quite the powerful tales of sisterhood, motherhood, and survival.