Borderlands Conference

CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 2020. She is a distinguished professor in Houston’s Department of Hispanic Studies and leads the graduate Spanish-language creative writing concentration. Her recent publications in Spanish include Autobiografía del algodón and the poetry collection La fractura exacta. English translations of her work include the essay collection Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country and the novels The Iliac Crest and The Taiga Syndrome.

EDUARDO HALFON is the author of fifteen books of fiction published in Spanish. His latest, Mourning, published in English by Bellevue Literary Press in 2018, received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award (US), the International Latino Book Award (US), the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France), and the Premio de las Librerías de Navarra (Spain). In 2018, he was awarded the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, his country’s highest literary honor.

JULIÁN HERBERT, born in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1971, is the author of eleven books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Canción de tumba (Tomb Song), La casa del dolor ajeno (The House of the Pain of Others), and Tráiganme la cabeza de Quentin Tarantino (Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino). He works as a screenwriter and a professor of literature. He performs with the rock group Los Tigres de Borges.

FERNANDA MELCHOR, born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. Her most recent novel, Hurricane Season (New Directions, 2020), won the Anna Seghers Award and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020.

This project received funding from the U of U English Department; the U of U Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs; Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks program; and Utah Humanities. Utah Humanities empowers groups and individuals to improve their communities through active engagement in the humanities. This project is also supported in part by Utah Arts & Museums, with funding from the State of Utah and the National Endowment for the Arts.