Reyna Grande

By Daniel Chacón,

Will Rose

Published May 17, 2026 at 11:00 AM MDT

In this episode of Words on a Wire, host Daniel Chacón speaks with acclaimed author Reyna Grande about her latest book, Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget. Their conversation explores the lasting emotional impact of migration, family separation, motherhood, memory, and the vulnerability of writing memoir. Grande reflects on the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the deeply personal process of revisiting trauma, and how essays allowed her to experiment with form and move freely through time and memory. Together, they discuss storytelling, identity, language, and the complicated inheritance of love, sacrifice, and survival across generations.

Additional information

For more information about Reyna Grande you can visit:https://reynagrande.com/

Originally aired on May 17, 2026

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Words On A Wire KTEP Programming

Daniel Chacón

Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories, Unending Rooms, was the 2007 winner of the Hudson Prize. He has also been awarded the American Book Award, the Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Southwest Book Award. His first collection of stories, Chicano Chicanery was a finalist in the Patterson Fiction Prize and his novel and the shadows took him is available from Simon and Schuster. His new book is a collection of stories called Hotel Júarez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. He’s a professor of Fiction Writing, Kafka, and Latino/a literature in the Creative Writing Department at UTEP.

See stories by Daniel Chacón

Will Rose

Will Rose is a longtime technology and marketing executive based out of NYC and Texas. He is the co-founder of Words on a Wire’s publishing imprint, eRadical Books, and now spearheads marketing strategy for the Words on a Wire podcast. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer at the EdTech startup, Student Select, and as Head of Data Science at the artificial intelligence company, Harqen AI.

See stories by Will Rose