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College of Humanities & Social Sciences

Daniel Peña

Photograph of Assistant Professor Daniel Pena

Daniel Peña

Assistant Professor of English

Office: S1062
713-221-8453
penad@uhd.edu

Scholarships

​Daniel Peña is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown where he specializes in Fiction.  He is a Pushcart Prize winning author whose work primarily focuses on immigration and the drug wars in Mexico.  Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he was a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar affiliated with the Centro de Investigaciones Sobre América Latina y El Caribe.  His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Rumpus, the Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, and Huizache among other outlets. He's currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog.

​​Daniel Peña's fiction focuses on the contemporary drug war in Mexico and topics surrounding transmigration. He's interested in narratives that humanize victims of violence in Latin America (including the borderlands) and the way storytelling can serve as a transformative force in reshaping and reframing the dialogue on immigration and drug policy. 

​ENG 3309 Intro to Creative Writing

ENG 3343 Workshop in Fiction

ENG 4309 Advanced Creative Writing

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Peña, Daniel. "Safehome." Ploughshares, Summer 2015, Ed. Lauren Groff, Emerson College Press, 2015: 116-28.   

Peña, Daniel. "Flying Mexicans." The Kenyon Review Online (Fall 2013). Web. 

Peña, Daniel. "On Riding A Death Train." Callaloo 32.2 (2009): 440-46. 

Peña, Daniel. "The Protest Mexico's Pro-Government Twitter Bots Couldn't Silence." Motherboard. VICE Media, 30 Sept. 2015. Web. 

Peña, Daniel. "Mexico Is Outraged over Citizens Killed in Egypt but Ignores the Dead at Home." The Guardian. 18 Sept. 2015. Web.

Pushcart Prize 

Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholarship

Freund Fellowship 

James McConkey Award

Last updated 7/2/2019 9:19 AM