Running Wild Press has announced the publication of two books by Tomas Baiza, director of the Advising and Academic Support Center and current undergraduate student in the Boise State creative writing program. Baiza’s novel “Deliver Me: A Pocho’s Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery,” and short fiction collection entitled “A Purpose To Our Savagery,” will be available in 2022.
Both works explore the themes of liminal identities, the concept of cultural authenticity, and navigating the gray areas between the commonly-accepted social and cultural spaces. “I wrote ‘Deliver Me’ with the goal of challenging traditional representation of Chicanx/Latinx characters in American multicultural literature,” Baiza said. “Too often we’re depicted as clear-cut types that fail to accurately reflect the complex interplay between individual and group identities that we negotiate. It was both rewarding and difficult to write about these issues using my college pizza delivery job as the literary backdrop.”
“All of the works in the collection I wrote in my creative writing classes, beginning in spring 2019,” Baiza said. “The classes gave me the encouragement and conceptual framework for creating the stories that I’ve wanted to tell for some time. In between the short fiction writing, I would work on the novel and get feedback from classmates and my faculty. I don’t think either of these books would have been possible without the help of Boise State’s creative writing community.”
“I am very pleased that both works found a home with Running Wild Press,” Baiza said. Running Wild Press is dedicated to the publication of compelling stories that “don’t fit neatly in a box.”