J. Malcolm Garcia

Literary investigative reporter J. Malcolm Garcia was a social worker and director of a homeless services agency, where he assisted unhoused people in San Francisco for fourteen years before he made the jump into journalism in 1997. His books include The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (2009); What Wars Leave Behind (2014); Without A Country: The Untold Story of America's Deported Veterans (2017); and Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost (2018), as well as three books from Seven Stories Press: The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dream (2018); Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful: Stories from Afghanistan (2022); Out of the Rain: A Novel (2024); and Alabama Village: Faith, Hope and Survival in a Southern Town (2025). In June 2025, Out of the Rain was longlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Garcia’s work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Essays, and he is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for a series on burn pits and how they affected American service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. Garcia is the nephew of celebrated Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer, winner of the inaugural Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role as Cyrano in the film Cyrano de Bergerac, and the grandson of Rafael Ferrer (1885-1951), an esteemed essayist and lawyer. Garcia has been a regular contributor to Guernica, Salon, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.