Letters to My FBI Agent: Notes from an Anarchist Under Surveillance

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Letters to My FBI Agent is a darkly funny memoir told in the form of direct address to the federal agent who can’t stop circling the narrator’s life.

What begins as a taunting correspondence with “Maria Garcia” (the name on the caller ID) becomes something oddly intimate: an investigation into how a person’s humanity can be reduced to a mugshot in a file and how that shapes the way you see yourself.

Moving between prison classrooms, punk shows, family life, political organizing, and the painful task of “existing on the right side of the law,” the narrator tracks a life living under the thumb of law enforcement, all while wrestling with the contradictions of being a respected teacher and a man with a past that others constantly rewrite.

Each letter is a story and a critique, from absurd encounters that turn violent to reflections on masculinity, love, and rage. The book offers a look at what it’s like to be surveilled by the FBI, all while dealing with the pressures of everyday life.

Letters to My FBI Agent asks the question, “When the world insists you are a monster, what does it take to remain fully human?”

Praise

"Dear readers: Slip Letters to My FBI Agent into your sack. Read it on the train or during your break at work. Let Josh Fernandez hold your hand and make you laugh, or perhaps tear up, as we struggle through this fascistic fever dream. The surveillance state may be one giant white van parked across the street, logging all of our hopes and dreams like Josh's fed interlocutor 'María' taking notes on his trip to the supermarket, but fear not: at the core of this unsettling narrative of repression is a resilient, if embattled, humanity that triumphs over MAGA terror."
—Mark Bray, author of Antifa and Unpunctuated Death Threats

"Josh Fernandez has turned the nightmare of state surveillance into a searching, searing, and deviously funny meditation on the dignity of a life lived in revolt—and the pathetic creeps paid to watch us do it. Letters to My FBI Agent is a monument to the resiliency of the human spirit under siege, and the old adage that writing is revenge."
—Jarrod Shanahan, author of Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help

"Josh Fernandez does it again. This book is a brilliant, sharp, funny act of resistance to the fascist machinations of a surveillance state while also a searing intervention on easy assumptions about masculinity and violence. A love letter to pain and honesty, you’ll laugh out loud at it while wiping away tears of rage and empathy. Fernandez deftly lets you know what not to do with those pesky normative desires for getting along with your boss, with your parents, with authoritative hacks. The book is a poetically rebellious gem that will make you want to kick shit over then sit in the sun watching birds fly overhead."
—Jessica Lawless, author of Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent: A Queer Memoir

About the Author

Josh Fernandez is an antiracist organizer, a father, runner, fighter, English professor, and writer whose stories have appeared in Spin, the Sacramento Bee, the Hard Times, and several alternative newsweeklies. PM Press published his book The Hands That Crafted the Bomb: The Making of a Lifelong Antifascist in 2024. He lives in Sacramento, California.

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