José Orduña is an essayist and short story writer. He received an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement, published by Beacon Press, explores his experience as a Mexican immigrant living in these United States. His work interrogates the entanglements between the human and the institution, and all the attendant violence. He strives to contextualize Latin American immigration to the United States as a symptom of the US’ unrelenting economic and military predation, to capture how those histories are written not only in books but as lines on people’s faces, and to implicate readers in the systems of oppression that make children leave their homes and walk thousands of miles alone. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, The Nation, The New England Review and elsewhere. To find his work visit joseorduna.com.