Biography
Roots, Education, and the Road Ahead
Juan Carlos Mazuera was born on January 28, 1963, in Cali, Colombia, at the city’s Hospital Departamental. He completed his first two years of elementary school at Camilo Torres School. His family later moved to Piendamó, Cauca, where he completed third through fifth grade. Part of that childhood, shaped by changing surroundings, economic hardship, wonder, and imagination, forms the emotional heart of his first novel.
In 1977, his family returned to Cali. He continued his secondary education at José Celestino Mutis School and later at Instituto Alférez Real, where he completed high school. He also took accounting courses at Professor Rafael Saladen’s academy and pursued independent studies in typing and shorthand.
From 1987 to 1990, he attended San Pedro Apóstol Major Seminary in Cali, where he completed his studies in philosophy. In 1991, he arrived in the United States. That summer, he studied English at the American Language Academy, then located at the University of Tampa in Florida. He later entered St.Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach as a seminarian for the Diocese of Orlando. He completed his theological formation at Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, New York, earning a Master of Divinity degree in 1999.
The Making of a Reader and Writer
His relationship with literature began early. At San Roque School, he participated in children’s theater and performed stories by Rafael Pombo, including Rin Rin Renacuajo. He also became an avid reader of comics, newspapers, celebrity magazines, and news reports, steadily developing a lasting fascination with the arts and the written word.
Around 1978, while living in Cali’s Libertadores neighborhood with his unforgettable pet, Saturnino, a traveling seller of dreams and books arrived at his door and placed One Hundred Years of Solitude in his hands with a simple, life-changing command: “You have to read it.” The figure of Úrsula, the great mother in that novel, immediately echoed the strength of Doña Stella. Soon afterward, he joined the Círculo de Lectores book club, and his life as a reader has never stopped.
During his formation at San Pedro Apóstol Major Seminary, he began writing episodes from his life, along with poems and short stories. His poetry collection, now nearly complete, will become his second book, while a future volume will gather the stories he has preserved over the years.
A Literature Forged from Adversity
Every neighborhood, every move, every experience, and every change of setting has become essential nourishment for his first novel: an autobiographical and historical work steeped in magical realism, hyperbole, and a kind of humor that overturns adversity. What might have remained only a wound became fuel for his writing. Hardship became momentum, fire, and seasoned wood with which to refine every sentence and transform each memory into something the reader can savor.
His philosophical formation allows him to enter the depths of the human person; his spiritual experience teaches him how to remain there with compassion; and his imagination enables him to magnify a character without erasing the truth. From that blend emerge figures meant to endure in the reader’s memory: Doña Stella; Mercedes Valderrama, the grandmother; Saturnino; and the neighborhoods that serve as school, stage, and witness to a life narrated in the first person.
Mazuera describes his work as real, historical, and hyperbolic biography. He heightens experience with artistic purpose so readers may laugh, weep, and travel along the roads life allowed him to walk. Those pages also hold the God he has learned to understand and embrace, and by whom he has felt accepted. That God has shaped the son, the friend, the companion, and the writer.
This is Juan Carlos Mazuera: a man refined by memory, faith, service, humor, and language. Readers will encounter him in every page, every sentence, and every character. From this point forward, the public will judge his work; he asks only that no one who enters it remain indifferent.