Online Pre-Order $20
Books will be shipped around the first week of June 2026.
PRESS KIT
ISBN: 978-0-9905779-7-3
48 pages Trade Paperback
Publication: June 2026
PRE-LAUNCH EVENT
Who are the real monsters in the Donkey Lady story?
Thu, May 28, 6-8pm | World Heritage Center | 3106 Roosevelt Ave, San Antonio, TX
A special Reading, Panel Discussion, and Exhibit for The Donkey Lady, featuring Carmen Tafolla and Thelma Ortiz Muraida. Books will be available for purchase at this free event.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Donkey Lady—long whispered about on San Antonio’s Southside—returns with a new voice. In The Donkey Lady: A Graphic Parable, Carmen Tafolla and Thelma Ortiz Muraida reclaim the legend as a story of violence, memory, and humanity.
Rooted in a story familiar to generations of San Antonians, the book reframes the haunting of the Donkey Lady Bridge as something deeper: a woman’s life marked by brutality, and a community shaped by what it chooses to remember—or forget.
At a time when stories of violence against women and cultural erasure persist, The Donkey Lady offers a powerful reimagining of a local myth as a narrative of witness, survival, and resistance.
“To be a San Antonian is to know and be spooked, from childhood on, by the story of the Donkey Lady. But how many of us knew that it was hatred which killed the gentle, loving La Callada and transformed her into the ghostly Donkey Lady? In just a few beautifully etched words and drawings, their pens dipped in the inkwells of their love, compassion, and sense of history, Carmen Tafolla and Thelma Ortiz Muraida have gifted us with a parable which not only restores La Callada’s humanity but also parallels the inhumanity of our times.”
— Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carmen Tafolla, Ph.D, former San Antonio and Texas Poet Laureate and the author of more than forty books, is the recipient of an Américas Award, three Tomás Rivera Book Awards, and eight International Latino Book Awards. Her work centers Mexican American culture, history and personal empowerment.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thelma Ortiz Muraida is an accomplished artist and graphic designer whose work spans children’s books, poetry collections, and visual storytelling. She has collaborated with Tafolla on multiple titles, among them Tamales, Comadres and the Meaning of Civilization, bringing layered, expressive imagery to culturally rooted narratives.