audio by year 2011

Paula Moya is a scholar of 20th and 21st century American literatures, Chicana/o cultural studies, feminist theory, and comparative studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford University. She has published widely on race and ethnicity in contemporary American literature.

In this brief talk, she explores some of the contradictory patterns of authority and authenticity occasioned by the cross-cultural production and reception of Latin American literature.

Daniel Alarcón is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, among others, and winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin. He was recently named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under Forty. His fiction, journalism and translations have appeared in A Public Space, El País, McSweeney’s, n+1, and Harper’s. Alarcón lives in Oakland, California, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.

What happens when Latin American literature and the Iowa Writer's Workshop collide? And why do so many readers ask Daniel Alarcón if he can recommend a good hotel in Cuzco? In this brief talk, Alarcón explores matters of canonicity and authenticity with respect to Latin American literature.