Cal State LA Professor Pablo Baler has been awarded the 2025 New American Fiction Prize for his novel Gilroy’s Gloryhole. The novel will be published in fall 2026 by New American Press.
The prestigious prize is awarded annually to a full-length fiction manuscript by New American Press, an independent publisher committed to bringing readers the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations from across the United States and around the world.
Baler, who is a professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Cal State LA, described the recognition as especially meaningful.
“It’s humbling to be recognized with the New American Fiction Prize,” he said. “It’s not just any award, but a recognition granted by a publisher committed to uncompromising literary fiction. They publish the types of novels I enjoy reading—novels that take risks and experiment with language and form.”
Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Baler has written most of his fiction in Spanish. After three decades in the United States, however, he began envisioning a Los Angeles–based story that demanded to be written in English.
“Most of the narrative work I’ve written has been in Spanish, but after 30 years of living in the U.S., certain images and ideas for a Los Angeles–based story began surfacing,” Baler said. “And they only made sense in English. The challenges of writing a novel in a language that isn’t your native language can be deeply generative.”
Baler describes Gilroy’s Gloryhole as a “screwball tragedy”—a darkly comic satire of American culture marked by “murderous miscalculations, sexual dysfunctions, and psychological catastrophes.”
The novel marks his debut in English and reflects both his transnational perspective and his deep engagement with Los Angeles as a literary landscape.
A graduate of Stanford University and UC Berkeley, Baler is an accomplished writer, art critic, and scholar. He is the author of the award-winning novels Circa, Chabrancán, and El lejano desoriente. His scholarly work includes Latin American Neo Baroque: Senses of Distortion, a widely praised study of neo-baroque aesthetics. He is also the editor and contributor to The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-First Century.
His short fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, X-Ray, Latin American Literature Today, and Litro Magazine, among others.
At Cal State LA, Baler is known for mentoring emerging writers and encouraging students to experiment boldly with language and form. He teaches courses on Latin-American literature and creative writing.
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