About Julian Robles

Julian Robles is a writer born in Riverside, California. He is the son of Mexican immigrants with roots in Jalisco, Mexico City, and Guerrero. Throughout Julian’s childhood, his family lived in different cities in Southern California before settling in Corona, where he attended middle school and high school.

At a young age, Julian became part of a large, blended family that brought together Mexican and Azerbaijani-Jewish cultures. A weekend at a cousin’s quinceañera might be followed the next month by Passover Seder with his extended stepfamily. In every home he entered, he saw immigrants striving for achievement that prioritized a collective uplifting of one’s community, be it his grandmother organizing local foodbanks or his parents providing financial and educational support to friends and family in the United States, Mexico, and Russia. Alongside this collectivist ethic, his parents and older relatives—who constituted the family’s first generation to attend college—cultivated an environment of intellectual curiosity. Julian’s parents were models for voracious reading that inspired his dedication to literature.

Julian majored in biology at Columbia University, where he was a John Jay Scholar and received support from the Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program Summer Enhancement Fellowship to undertake medical and epidemiological research in Mexico. Spurred by his experiences in Mexico and a lifelong passion for Latin American literature, he began formally studying creative writing his junior year of college. After graduating from Columbia University, Julian earned an MFA in creative writing at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. In Minnesota, Julian cofounded the literary organization Poetry Online with fellow writer Tarik Dobbs to publish and print accessible literature and art. Julian then moved to Mexico City with support from the Fulbright García-Robles Scholarship to complete research for forthcoming fiction and poetry collections.

Currently, Julian is pursuing a PhD in English at University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on cosmopolitanism and representation of migration in English-language literature, two subjects that reflect his upbringing in an immigrant household with roots in disparate regions of the world. Julian is interested in synthesizing his academic research with his fiction and poetry to examine the conditions of peripheral artistic production.