Carmen Boullosa, “Heavens on Earth?” (Nov. 22)

Published: September 28th, 2016

Category: News

One of Mexico’s leading contemporary novelists, poets, and playwrights speaks on Latin American science fiction.

Carmen Boullosa’s lecture in English, “Heavens on Earth?” will begin at 10:30 AM, in 215 Dauer Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

About Carmen Boullosa

(Photograph ©2016 El Universal)

Carmen Boullosa (b. Mexico City, 1954) is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets and playwrights. Some of her seventeen novels deal with historical themes – the world of Moctezuma, the early Colonial period in Mexico City, the life of pirates in the 17th Century Caribbean, the era of Cervantes – and have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Russian. Boullosa also writes (and prints) art books, mixing image and text, which have been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de México, the Sala Pablo Ruiz Picasso del Museo de Arte Moderno de Madrid, and the New York Public Library. Her poems have appeared in the art books of leading painters such as Juan Soriano, Magali Lara, Othón Tellez and Philip Hughes, whose book with Boullosa, Jump of the Manta Ray, was a 2003 British Book Design Award finalist.

With Salman Rushdie, Boullosa co-founded the Mexico City House for Persecuted Writers at Mexico City, and together with Rushdie and Distinguished Professor of History Mike Wallace, she has been exploring the possibility of a similar operation being established on Governor’s Island, New York. She has also had a distinguished teaching career, holding visiting appointments at San Diego State, Georgetown University, and La Sorbonne (Alfonso Reyes Chair), and has lectured at Brown, Princeton, Irvine, UCLA, and institutions in England (Trinity College at Oxford), Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, and elsewhere.

In 2001, she came to New York as a fellow of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, and decided to spend more time in the city. In 2002–2003 she was Visiting Professor at NYU (holding the Andrés Bello Chair). During 2003-2004 she was Visiting Professor at Columbia. From 2004 to 2011, she was a Distinguished Lecturer at City College, CUNY.

Since 2005, she has co-hosted the CUNY-T.V., NY EMMY–award winning, Nueva York, in which she interviews major Spanish-speaking writers, artists and intellectuals. In 2007 she co-founded Café Nueva York, a group of writers who work in Spanish and live in New York, dedicated to reclaiming the forgotten legacy of their forebears who also wrote in Spanish and lived in the city. She was a consultant to “Nueva York,” a major exhibition to be mounted by the New York Historical Society, on the 400-year history of New York’s relations with the Spanish-speaking world.

Her lecture is sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar, and the Science Fiction Working Group.

 

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