Carla Trujillo was born to a working-class family in Las Vegas, Nevada, and grew up in northern California. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay area for the past 15 years. Her extended family and roots are New Mexican (Chicana). She works as an administrator in diversity -education and advocacy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of the anthology, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, which won a Lambda Book Award and the Out/Write Vanguard Award in 1992 and is now in its third printing. Her critical study, Living Chicana Theory, is in its second printing and widely used in college classrooms. What Night Brings is her first novel; excerpts from What Night Brings have already won awards from the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund and Writers at Work.