Mauro Javier Cárdenas was born and brought up in Guayaquil, Ecuador and studied Economics at the University of Stanford. He is the author of The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, Sept 2016; Literatura Random House, 2018). His work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, ZYZZYVA and BOMB. He won the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Prize.