Luz at Midnight by Marisol Cortez, winner of the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters

Deeply embedded in the landscapes of South Texas, Luz at Midnight tells the story of an ill-timed love that unfolds in the time of climate change. Booksmart but naïve, Citlali Sanchez-O'Connor has just been hired to organize a San Antonio campaign against “gleaning,” a controversial new mining practice that promises a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Soon she encounters Joel Champlain, a journalist struggling to hide his manic-depression as he uncovers the scandals that surround gleaning. During a chance trip together to Texas's Gulf Coast, Lali is struck by a love as powerful as the electrical storm that birthed Luz, the unearthly canine trickster who has thrown them together. But Lali—married with a baby, poised to leave town for an academic job, and trained to think everything is explicable—finds she must decide what their connection means, if anything, for a path already set in motion. 

A genre-hopping narrative that layers story with reporting, poetry, scholarship, and teatro, Luz questions the nature of desire and power, asking: What throws us into the path of those we love, and what pulls us apart? What agency powers the universe—and do we have any agency of our own to create a different world?