Chacón is recipient of The Hudson Prize, a Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, The American Book Award, and the Peter and Jean de Main Emerging Writers Award, among others. He is a professor in the bilingual MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, on the border of Mexico and the US, where he teaches courses in Borges, Kafka, Physics as Metaphor, and Fiction Writing.

 

He has a literary radio show called Words on a Wire (KTEP.org) which he co-hosts with Benjamin Alire Sánez.

 

Chacón is also a photographer/blogger, and his work can be seen here.
 

​“Daniel Chacón’s distinctive storytelling, with its defiance to linearity and closure, with its leanings toward metafiction, gestures south to the Latin American greats like Borges, Cortázar and Paz, but his sensibility is pure Chicano — the hero and anti-hero of the twenty-first century who sinks and swims through libraries and barrios, politics and passions, tradition and innovation. Unending Rooms is a testament of identity as experienced, not on the margins, but at the center of the beautiful and terrifying cycles.”

— Rigoberto González, author of Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa
 

“Although a collection of stories, this book is A Portrait of the Chicano Artist as a Young Man, with the author becoming more literary as the pieces accumulate.”— The New York Times Book Review
 

“A fine debut collection. Chacón has the sensibility (and the sense of humor!) to bring these stories heartbreakingly to life.”— Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero Sisters
 

“Although the impact of these stories is utterly adult, they are told with deceptive and seductive simplicity, and reading them is like being invited back into childhood, where fantastical premises, straight-forward syntax, and endless possibility were the literary pleasures. Chacon has either reinvented the form, or refreshingly reminded his readers of what stories do best: linger in the mind like a sudden firework, a flash of pretty magic, in an otherwise dark sky.”— Library Journal
 

“Unending Rooms is a visit to the hidden recesses of the mind, a place where Jorge Luis Borges and Stephen King sit down for coffee while a cello plays a bittersweet melody you can almost remember. Once you enter, you will emerge a different person.”— Kathleen Alcala, author of The Desert Remembers My Name and Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist
 

“What is true throughout the stories is a sensitivity to the heart of the characters, a terrific sense of the construction of a story, and an ability to leave readers questioning what survives.”— Clackamas Literary Review
 

“This is an intriguing character study that takes an extremely dark look at the impact of the American dream on one’s roots. The story line is driven by the five Molinas as readers get a close look at each of them and through them aspects of the Mexican-American culture. Daniel Chacón paints a deep tale that makes the case that assimilation is not all that it seems.”— Harriet Klausner
 

“In many ways and the shadows took him is a study which lays bare the desires and motives of a family in conflict. The family disintegrates as it struggles to escape the rule of the tyrannical father. The captivating portrayal of young Joey makes this a Greek rites of passage drama told from a Chicano point of view.”— Rudolfo Anaya