EPISODE · Feb 8, 2026 · 34 MIN

Daniel Peña: We're products of everything

from Chosen Tongue

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing.  Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among  other venues. He's currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area. In this conversation, Daniel reflects on identity as something multiple and shifting, shaped by language, movement, and lived experience. We talk about race and belonging in the United States, the role of art as a form of resistance, and the ways language — and even something as ordinary as soccer — can become a bridge between worlds.