Javier O. Huerta is the author of American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (Arte Publico 2012) and Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Publico 2007), which received the 31st Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine. His poems have recently been anthologized in Art and Artists: Poems, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice. He received his MFA from the Bilingual Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and is currently a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines 19th Century articulations of laughter in relation to the simultaneous belief that laughter is essentially mechanistic and that the essence of laughter is irreducible to mechanism. Other research interests include U.S. Latino Literature and Literature of Immigration, including what he considers to be an emerging field, the Literature of the Undocumented. Huerta has been a contributing writer for Harriet, the blog for the Poetry Foundation.