About Carla J. Hagen

Carla Hagen is an author, poet, radio-show host and retired attorney. She recently released the second novel in her Minnesota-Canadian Borderland Trilogy series, Muskeg. Carla’s debut novel, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane, won the 2012 Midwest Independent Publishers Awards for best literary fiction and best historical fiction. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as Voices for the Land and When Last on the Mountain, as well as in journals like Talking Stick, Saint Paul Almanac, Border Senses and Sing, Heavenly Muse!

Carla is the co-host of a weekly Latin music show with Eve MacLeish on KFAI 90.3 FM in Minneapolis called Corazon Latino. When not writing, she swims, bikes, hikes, travels and studies French, Arabic, Portuguese, Norwegian and Catalan. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and is working on the third novel in her Borderland Trilogy.

EARLY DAYS

Carla Hagen was born in Baudette, Minnesota, a little town perched on the Canadian border. The land is covered with forests, water and peat bogs, and is the landscape for much of her writing.

Carla’s early exposure to French and Norwegian led her to study French and Spanish at St. Cloud State University. In 1971, she went to Mexico City for a six-week course and stayed for about four years. Carla studied Spanish language, literature and linguistics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She also wrote articles — in Spanish as Carla Rimada, a pseudonym that hid the fact she was a gringa — for the weekly magazine, Mañana.

Carla continued her graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, and published poetry in Punto de Partida (UNAM) and Meridiano (University of Texas). She also wrote for The Austin Sun, the monthly Austin Magazine and La Fuerza. Carla also participated in a modern dance troupe, CrossCulture.

A PASSION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

In 1979, Carla received a National Endowment for the Humanities Youth Grant to collect oral histories and corridos (topical ballads from Mexico and its border) from migrant farm workers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley where she recorded, photographed and listened to extraordinary music, stories and people. Carla returned to Minnesota in 1980, settling in the Twin Cities. She contributed to the Northern Sun News and worked for the Minnesota Department for Human Rights as a writer and then a case investigator. Her passion for social justice led her to pursue her law degree at the University of Minnesota Law School. After graduation, she began her career as a public defender in Hennepin County. After seven years, she became an Assistant Hennepin County Attorney, prosecuting criminal cases. She retired from law in 2017 as senior attorney in the mental health division.

DISCOVERING A VOICE

The Minnesota-Canadian border, where she grew up, and Mexico, where she came of age, inform much of Carla’s work. While she has always been a writer, Carla decided to pursue her passion for writing fiction in 1996 when she began a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in writing at Hamline University. She still practiced law, however, working every other week for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Domestic Abuse Service Center. At Hamline, she was an editor of the Water~Stone Review and discovered one of her Borderland Trilogy main characters, Sadie, which led to the development of her first novel, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.

WRITING AWARDS

2012, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane, Midwest Independent Publishers Awards, best literary fiction

2012, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane, Midwest Independent Publishers Awards, best historical fiction

2002, Hamline University, Outstanding Fiction Thesis Nomination

2001, New Letters, Creative Nonfiction Finalist

2000, Voices For the Land, Second Place

1999-2000, The Loft Mentor Series, Fiction