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Juana Moriel Payne
Phd, MA, MFA, MA, BA Assistant Professor She/Her/HersEducation
PhD., Borderlands History, University of Texas at El Paso
MA in History, University of Texas at El Paso
MFA in Bilingual Creative Writing, University of Texas at El Paso
MA in Hispanic Literature, University of Texas at El Paso
BA in Hispanic Literature, University of Texas at El Paso
Biography
Dr. 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 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.