Tulane University

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University has canceled its inaugural event for 2020, citing concerns over the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and adherence to university protocol. Please visit the Tulane News website for more information.

As part of the New Orleans Book Festival, this panel brings together three significant voices in Spanish-language literature: Gabriela Alemán (Ecuador), Yuri Herrera (México), and Rodrigo Fuentes (Guatemala). Moderated by local Cuban-American writer Christopher Romaguera, their conversation will explore sources of inspiration, writing practices, and the publication process in the Latin American context. The event will take place in English.

Panelists:

Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán has published 13 stand-alone works, including novels, short stories, and poetic prose. Her most recent releases are the short story collection La muerte silba un blues (2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 Gabriel García Márquez Prize for Short Story, and the novel Humo (2017), which won the Premio Joaquín Gallegos Lara for fiction in Ecuador. The English translation of her 2007 novel Poso Wells was published in 2018. In addition to her writing, Alemán has worked as a journalist, editor, researcher and translator. She holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Tulane. Now on the faculty of Universidad de San Francisco in Quito, she was a Stone Center Greenleaf Scholar in Residence in the spring of 2019 and continues to direct the Latin American Writers Series.

Yuri Herrera was born in Actopan, Mexico in 1970. He has written four novels—_Trabajos del reino_ (2017), Senales que precederán al fin del mundo (2015), La transmigración de los cuerpos (2016), and El incendio de la mina El bordo (2018)—as well as short stories, articles, non-fiction, and essays published across the U.S., Latin America, and Spain. He was editor and founder of the literary magazine el perro. The first of his novels to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015) won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. Herrera currently teaches at Tulane University.

Rodrigo Fuentes is a Guatemalan-born writer of short stories. He received the II Premio Centroamericano Carátula in 2014, and his colleciton Trucha Panza arriba was a finalist for the 2018 Premio Gabriel García Márquez. His works have been published in Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, as well as in translation in France and Scotland. Fuentes is also the co-founder and editor of the magazine Suelta and of the digital publishing house and literary journal Traviesa. He currently teaches in the Department of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross.

Moderator:

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. Romaguera has been published in The Daily Beast, Curbed National, Peauxdunque Review, New Orleans Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog. He is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of New Orleans.