https://www.ricardoawilson.com/about-me-1 daily 1.0 2026-02-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ab3f88036099b1188ad8ac7/bc33d8c1-023b-472e-bec0-df2ab73558c7/IMG_8367_V3.jpg About Ricardo Wilson, a creative writer and scholar, is an associate professor of English at Williams College and the founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation, a residency and arts advocacy organization for writers of color from the United States and Latin America. He has, most recently, extracted from the archive and edited Troubled Lands, a forthcoming and previously unpublished collection of short fiction from Mexico and Cuba translated by Langston Hughes in 1935 (Princeton University Press, 2026) and is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books, 2021) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern UP, 2020). An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories was selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award. His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, swamp pink, Northwest Review, The Offing, and Stirring. He is currently the Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence at McGill University and is at work on his forthcoming novel Even Worse than the Nightmare. Check out Ricardo’s essay on what lies beneath one of the novellas in his collection at The Offing, an excerpt in BOMB, his interviews with PEN America and The Common, and reviews of his work in the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Brooklyn Rail. Represented by Kerry D’Agostino at Curtis Brown. For media interest in Troubled Lands, contact Jodi Price at Princeton University Press. https://www.ricardoawilson.com/troubled-lands daily 0.75 2025-12-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ab3f88036099b1188ad8ac7/1765067712113-T2ETCPY3NGAK8NMWEA6S/Troubled+Lands_Cover.jpg Troubled Lands “This is precisely the time when we needed this long-overdue book: an exquisite selection of Mexican and Cuban stories translated by Langston Hughes, a man who was a fierce traveler of his time, with a rich introduction by Ricardo Wilson. These stories combine literary virtuosity with an ear for the pulse of history, and Hughes’s translation is committed to the political bravery and curiosity that led him to undertake this work. A true jewel of a book.” Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands, his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers. https://www.ricardoawilson.com/an-apparent-horizon daily 0.75 2025-12-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ab3f88036099b1188ad8ac7/1620988667804-7FQ1JR8GIKM5NOZQN7YT/Screen+Shot+2021-05-14+at+6.36.10+AM.png An Apparent Horizon “Breadth and subtlety, suffused with quiet wit and a laser eye, are but a few of the hallmarks of Ricardo Wilson’s debut collection An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories . . . Wilson shines a distinctive and complex light on Black lives and the wider world with poetic skill and syntactic verve. A talented storyteller, a marvelous book!” John Keene, author of Counternarratives An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories takes you to the turn of the 20th Century during the construction of the Panama Canal, the avant-garde theatre scene of New York in the early 1970s, and a present day textured by the psychic and physical violence inflicted on black life. The novella that gives the collection its name follows Mar Gillette, a white environmental activist, in the weeks that follow her failed hunger strike in the California desert. It is in the relative calm of Mar’s childhood home in the hills of Los Angeles that we begin to see the contours of the incomplete mourning of her father that precipitated her fleeing to the desert. After discovering a folder with a collection of her father’s handwritten notes, Mar is forced to delicately navigate a world now conditioned by the burgeoning but nonetheless unconfirmed awareness that she had a half-brother who perished in the police violence surrounding the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. It is through a developing romantic relationship with Teddy, the son of her father’s gardener, that we see her attempt to suture the distances in her life—between herself and her mother, herself and the city, and, ultimately, herself and her father. But like the work of the entire collection, it is ultimately a meditation on that which is irreconcilable and escapes recording. https://www.ricardoawilson.com/the-nigrescent-beyond daily 0.75 2025-12-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ab3f88036099b1188ad8ac7/1579633111491-3VL9GQXH6FUF2P3A95YR/WILSON.jpg The Nigrescent Beyond “With The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness we are at once given a subtle new radical voice in thought and a sustained and necessary new exposure to the emplacement of matters of ‘Blackness’ across the hemisphere, by way of a wholly other experience of all that is Mexico.” Nahum Dimitri Chandler, author of Toward an African Future: Of the Limit of World Despite New Spain’s significant participation in the early transatlantic slave trade, the collective imagination of the Mexican nation evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand itself as devoid of a black presence. In The Nigrescent Beyond, Ricardo Wilson proposes a framework for understanding this psychic vanishing of blackness and think through how it can be used to both productively unsettle contemporary multicultural and post-racial discourses within the United States and further the interrogations of being and blackness within the larger field of black studies. Pushing against the reflex to catalog the essence of these vanishings with the aim of restoring an imagined community, he models a practice of reading that instead honors the disruptive possibilities offered by an ever-present awareness of that which lies, irretrievable, past the horizon of vanishing itself. In doing so, he engages with historical accounts detailing maroon activities in early New Spain, contemporary coverage of the push to make legible Afro‑Mexican identities, the electronic archives of the Obama presidency, and the work of, among others, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora,Octavio Paz, Ivan Van Sertima, Miguel Covarrubias, Steven Spielberg, and Colson Whitehead. Nigrescence, the process of becoming dark, is herein mobilized to articulate the contours of a barrier at the limits of a collective imagination, beyond which radical black matter(s) has become and is becoming unreadable even as we read.