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Marcos Gonsalez is an author, essayist, scholar, and assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. His research on queer and trans Latinx aesthetics and cultural production has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Inquiry, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pedro's Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land (2021) and In Theory, Darling: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination (Beacon Press, May 20, 2025), which is a love letter to queer color theory and how it has helped him discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work toward liberation.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
How theory can change your life and the world around you. Also, how theory can be pleasurable.
On your nightstand now:
Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney. I love Austen's work, so Romney's deep dive into which writers informed Austen is such a cool idea for a book. I also love the work of Frances Burney, who is one of the writers Austen read, so naturally I need to read this book.
Favorite book when you were a child:
All the Animorphs books. I read and re-read these books voraciously. These books stemmed my love of the science fiction genre. I don't read as much science fiction these days as I would like, but I sure do watch plenty of science fiction films/shows and play science-fiction video games.
Your top five authors:
Hilton Als, Kate Zambreno, Wayne Koestenbaum, Saidiya Hartman, Jamaica Kincaid. All of these authors are stylists of the written word, which is why I love reading them. To see what writers can think up, dream up, through words. The sentences of each of these writers pushes me to rethink how the world can be.
Book you've faked reading:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. The goal is to someday read it, along with Middlemarch by George Eliot--two very lengthy tomes. I feel as a literature professor, these are books I have to read in order to keep my cred. Some summer on a beach in the Caribbean I'll read them.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Mansfield Park. Not often the go-to Austen book for most people but this one charms me. Lady Bertram and her pug are everything to me.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Penguin Book of Demons (edited by Scott G. Bruce). I read this one on the subway--the stares one gets!
Book you hid from your parents:
Hero by Perry Moore. I borrowed this book from the library. Probably the first book I ever read that featured gay characters and storylines. Very formative for me as a little queer kid. I also remember crying while reading it.
Book that changed your life:
These two equally: The Women by Hilton Als and My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. The ways in which these two writers approached the subjects of their books--admiringly, critically, speculatively, intimately--forever shaped my own writing and intellectual practice. These books and these authors opened up worlds for me I had not yet known.
Five books you'll never part with:
I dream of being a dilettante, and my guiding light in that endeavor is Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. I have an entire book in me on Nugent's work--someday I hope I can write it. Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography by Edgar Garcia is an experimental wonder, just formative for anyone who wants to do decolonialized thinking and imagining. A strange one: Mornings in Mexico by D.H. Lawrence. This book of travel writing steered my dissertation in grad school, and I always find myself in awe of Lawrence's crudely exquisite prose and how it thinks of Mexico. Cane by Jean Toomer is another literary wonder for me. Just opened up doors for my own writing and what one can do on the page. A book of poetry I constantly think of and keep returning to is Diaries of a Terrorist by Christopher Soto. Soto is one of my favorite poets.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
It was revelation the first time I read City of God by Gil Cuadros. The profoundly moving attention he gives to the queer Mexican American body was something I needed when I first encountered him in my early 20s. He gave me possibility when possibility was sorely lacking in my life.