Escrituras Migrantes: Writings on Unhomeliness

Note: This event has been postponed. Please check back for updates.

Organized by Ariana Huberman

This forum will address the topics of migrations, dislocations, and political disruption in contemporary Latin American literature. The authors featured in this forum engage with the current general sense of disconnect between geographic space, culture, and identity that expatriates, immigrants, and exiles’ experience. Their writing deals with dislocations and alienations—geographic, cultural, linguistic, affective—in unique ways. They are joined, however, by the space from which they wrestle with notions of foreignness and locality to examine the ways in which belonging, citizenship, and ownership and can be, and has been understood in the past 50 years.

Supported by the John B. Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Department of Spanish, the Distinguished Visitors Program, the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies at Haverford College, Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies at Bryn Mawr College, and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.

Participants

Roberto Castillo Sandoval, Haverford College

Roberto Castillo Sandoval is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Haverford College. Among his most recent fiction works are his novel Muriendo por la dulce patria mía (Laurel Editores, 2017), "The Laws of Motion" (Kenyon Review, 2019), and Los muertos del año, a collection of fictional obituaries (Laurel Editores, 2020). His translations into Spanish include Herman Melville's Bartleby, el escribano. Una historia de Wall Street (Hueders, 2017), Wakefield y otros cuentos (Hueders, 2019), and a volume of Edgar A. Poe's selected classic short stories (Laurel Editores, forthcoming). His book of essays and chronicles, Antípodas (Cuarto Propio, 2014) was one of three finalists for the 2015 Premio Municipal de Literatura de Santiago.

Liliana Colanzi, Cornell University

Liliana Colanzi was born in Bolivia. She has published the short story books Permanent Vacations (2010) and Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and has edited the anthology of feminist essays La desobediencia (2019). In 2015 she won the Aura Estrada literature award. The Hay Festival Cartagena included her among the best Latin American writers under 40 (Bogota39, 2017). She teaches Latin American literature at Cornell University. Our Dead World has been translated into five languages.

Sergio Chejfec, New York University

Sergio Chejfec is an Argentine writer of narrative and essays who lives in New York City. He teaches at NYU in the Creative Writing in Spanish MFA Program. He has published several books, including novels, essays, and short stories. Some of them have been translated Into English: The Incompletes, Open Letter, Rochester, 2019; Baroni, A Journey, Almost Island, New Delhi, 2017; The Dark, Open Letter, 2013; The Planets, 2012; My Two Worlds, Open Letter, 2011.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the former director of the Latina/o Studies Program. He received his A.B. from Harvard (1991) and M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia (1999). He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (2009), Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (2009), Abolición del pato (2013), A Brief and Transformative Account of Queer History (2016), and Escenas transcaribeñas: ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (2018). He has co-edited two issues of CENTRO Journal on Puerto Rican queer sexualities as well as Keywords for Latina/o Studies (NYU Press, 2017). He is currently writing on Puerto Rican transgender and drag performance and activism. He performs as Lola von Miramar since 2010.

Sylvia Molloy, New York University

Sylvia Molloy is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emerita at New York University, where she taught Latin American and Comparative literatures and established the Creative Writing in Spanish Program. Her critical work includes La Diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle; Las letras de Borges; At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America; Hispanisms and Homosexualities, Poéticas de la distancia and Poses de fin de siglo. She is also the author of two novels En breve cárcel and El común olvido, and three collections of short prose pieces, Varia imaginación, Desarticulaciones and Vivir entre lenguas and Citas de lectura. She has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has served as President of the Modern Language Association of America and of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana and holds an honorary degree in humane letters from Tulane University.

Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Cornell University

Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia, 1967) teaches Latin America literature at Cornell University since 1997. His published works include the novels The Matter of Desire (2004), Turing's Delirium (2006), Norte [North] (2011), and Los días de la peste (2017), as well as the short story collections Amores imperfectos [Imperfect loves] (2000), Las visiones (2016), and Desencuentros (2019), among others. His work has been translated into twelve languages. He was awarded the Premio Juan Rulfo 1977 for the short story "Dochera," the Premio Nacional de Novela 2002 in Bolivia for Turing's Delirium.