Trained as a historian of Latin America, with a focus on the colonial borderlands, I explore the layered histories of race, ritual, faith, and survival. My book Drama Under the Skin traces the intimate theater of Baroque Catholic life in Northern New Spain, while my research reconstructs overlooked narratives—Afro-Mexican communities, domestic laborers, and the everyday architectures of resilience that shape the Americas.

Alongside this, I write fiction and poetry that return to these same terrains through another door. My novels and poems inhabit the border as a living presence—restless, haunted, luminous. In works like Trigueña, La caza del venado, and Madriguera, characters move through landscapes charged with memory, where the past is never past, and identity unfolds in shifting, sometimes unsettling forms.

As an editor* and teacher, I am drawn to voices that unsettle certainty and expand the ways we tell our stories. At Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, I teach and mentor writers and scholars who, like me, are listening for what history whispers and what imagination dares to answer.

*The Rush Magazine and Ámbitos Feministas Journal (access through buttons in the navigation bar)

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Juana Moriel-Payne was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where the border is less a line than a constant negotiation between worlds. She is a historian, novelist, and poet whose work moves between archival memory and imaginative reckoning. Her scholarly book, Drama Under the Skin: Baroque Catholicism in Northern New Spain (2024), excavates the ritual and lived experience of colonial life, while her award-winning novels in Spanish—Trigueña (winner of Publicaciones 2012 and recipient of the BRLA Southwest Book Award, 2014) and La caza del venado (finalist, Contacto Latino, 2016)—trace the intimate and haunted terrains of identity, violence, and belonging.

Her poetry collection Madriguera (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2025) marks a further descent into the interior landscapes that shape her work—spaces where language becomes both refuge and reckoning. Trained in Borderlands and Latin American history, with advanced degrees in creative writing and Hispanic literature, Moriel-Payne brings a multidisciplinary lens to both her scholarship and creative practice.

She is a professor at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, where she teaches Latin American history and creative writing. She is currently at work on a memoir, A Girl in the Land of Darkness, a meditation on girlhood, memory, and the shifting realities of the U.S.–Mexico border.