The Flower in the Skull
Deep in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico in the 1870s, a village of Opata Indians is attacked by soldiers. Along with the rest of her tribe, Concha is driven from her homeland and eventually finds her way to Tucson, where she finds a job cleaning houses and caring for children. When her own daughter, Rosa, is born, the legacy of Concha's dislocation continues, as Rosa is raised far from her native culture and struggles to find her place in a strange world. As she did in her acclaimed, award-winning novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, Kathleen Alcalá takes on the complexities of cultural heritage, identity, and assimilation, and explores the mysterious nature of place, spiritualism, and faith in the lives of these extraordinary ordinary people.
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Kathleen Alcalá
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) is the author of a short-story collection and three novels set in the American Southwest and nineteenth-century Mexico and a collection of essays. She teaches creative writing at workshops and programs in Washington state and elsewhere, including Seattle University, the University of New Mexico and Richard Hugo House. Alcalá is also a co-founder of and contributing editor to The Raven Chronicles. A play based on her novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, was produced by The Miracle Theatre of Portland, Oregon. She served on the board of Richard Hugo House and the advisory boards of Con Tinta, Field’s End and the Centrum Writers Conference. She is the winner of several awards for her writing, including an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in 2007.
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