About Jesus Francisco

     Jesus Francisco Sierra was born in Havana. The middle of three siblings.  The first few years of his life were spent in Lawton, a working class neighborhood, where his mother’s side of the family had been for over ninety years.  Aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived within a four-block radius. A few years later, they moved to Fontanar, a more suburban neighborhood not far from the Jose Marti International Airport. This is where his fondest childhood memories were born. It was there that  he learned to swim, play baseball and soccer, ride a bike, and laugh with his friends.

           His father died suddenly in 1965, nineteen days after his thirty-eighth birthday, a month before Jesus Francisco was to turn eight years old. He began to write after his father's death.  Years later, that incident inspired him to write an essay, “On Writing, Fathers and Sons” (see link in this website). 

            Four years after his father passed, they immigrated to the US and landed in San Francisco’s Mission District. He has lived in the Bay Area since then. While most of his life has been spent in the United States, it is the trauma of loss, both of his father and his birthplace, that has most shaped him  as a writer.

            He struggled to accept this new identity at first, even waiting twenty-five years before becoming a US citizen, seeing American citizenship as a sort of betrayal of his birthplace. In that process of introspection and search, his writing literally came out of the closet. After so many years of journaling, writing stories and reading in an effort to make sense of his life, it was time to share his words with the world. He figured perhaps someone would read them and find something in his stories that might help them in their own quest for understanding.  His work reflects his search for answers through works of fiction, essays and other writings.

            His unpublished short story collection "At Times of Loss and Other Cuban Stories" was runner up in the 2023 Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize and a finalist for the 2025 EastOver Press Debut Collection. He was recently awarded the 2025 Fiction prize from the San Francisco Literary Foundation.  

He is on the Board of Directors for The Writer's Grotto in San Francisco, and one of the founders of the Rooted & Written Conference at The Writers Grotto, the only free writing conference by writers of color for writers of color.

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He holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and is currently at work on his first novel.