Joseph Cassara Books in Order

Joseph Cassara was born and raised in New Jersey, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and Sicilian father. He grew up close enough to New York City for its sounds, family stories, and larger-than-life energy to feel near, even before he knew the city well himself.

His route into fiction ran through school. Cassara earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Columbia University, then an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has also held fellowships at places including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and the Studios of Key West.

At graduate school, he initially saw himself as a short-story writer. He wrote a piece called “Xtravaganza” for workshop, only to have his classmates tell him that its cast and scope belonged in a novel. He resisted the idea at first, then spent the next several years following the story where it wanted to go.

That workshop story became The House of Impossible Beauties.

Published in 2018, the novel looks to New York’s ballroom world in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was inspired by the documentary Paris Is Burning and by the real House of Xtravaganza, while remaining a work of fiction. Cassara combines imagined characters and private lives with figures and history connected to the house, giving room to the people behind the performances, the clothes, and the ballroom names.

The book follows a chosen family shaped by love, ambition, friendship, and hard circumstances. Its characters are young queer and trans people, many of them Latinx, trying to build safety and belonging while facing poverty, addiction, violence, sex work, and the AIDS crisis. Cassara has spoken about wanting queer Latin kids to have the full, complicated lives on the page that he rarely saw in stories when he was younger.

Family is at the center of his work, but not the simple kind. In The House of Impossible Beauties, family is something people make together, day by day, through care, arguments, jokes, rivalries, and showing up when someone needs help. The novel also makes room for ordinary pleasures, not only suffering, which helps its characters feel like people rather than symbols.

The book won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, along with two International Latino Book Awards, and it was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Cassara now teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University, where he is an associate professor and the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair. His next novel, a historical fiction project about painter Grant Wood, is scheduled for publication in 2027.