Latino Literary Cultures Project

Latino Literature / La Literatura Latina IV

A Bilingual Conference at UC Santa Cruz

Friday, November 30, 2012 • Stevenson Event Center

Bringing writers and scholars together in thoughtful interchange, “Latino Literature/La literatura latina IV” is the fourth biennial conference of the Latino Literary Cultures Project/ Proyecto culturas literarias latinas. This daylong event is free and open to the public.

11am – 4:30pm Scholarly panels featuring:

José David Saldívar
Marcial González
Claudia Milian
Desirée Martín
Javier O. Huerta
Angie Bonilla
Kendra Dority

5-7pm Featured Author Readings and Book Signings from:

Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California, author of 21 books and winner of multiple awards including the National Book Critics Circle

Melinda Palacio, author of two books, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award winner

Javier O. Huerta, award-winning poet and author of two books

Scroll for Author Biographies Program Scholar Biographies Directions

Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera, recently named the Poet Laureate of California, has had a distinguished career spanning four decades. His publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children, with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. Recently he published two volumes of collected poems, Half the World in Light, which won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights, 2007), which emphasizes his contributions to the San Francisco Renaissance and to the emergence of spoken-word poetry.

Javier O. Huerta

Javier O. Huerta is the author of American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (Arte Público Press 2012) and Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Público Press 2007), which received the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine. His poems have recently been anthologized in Art and Artists: Poems, American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Huerta also studies laughter and literature in the English PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught the following courses: “Politics and Poetics of Refusal,” “Documents and the Literature of the Undocumented,” and “Laughter and Literature.” Originally from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas via Houston, Texas, he currently lives, studies, and writes in Berkeley.

Melinda Palacio

Melinda Palacio’s first novel, Ocotillo Dreams, (ASU Bilingual Press, 2011) won the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles award for Excellence in Literature and the Mariposa Award for Best First Book at the 2012 International Latino Book Awards at the Instituto Cervantes in Manhattan. Tia Chucha Press has just released her her first full-length poetry book, How Fire Is A Story, Waiting. She received a B.A. from Berkeley and an M.A. from UC Santa Cruz. Melinda has been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers; her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place cash prize and publication in 2010. Her work has been published in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, including BorderSenses, Buffalo Carp, Black Renaissance Noire, PALABRA, Poets and Artists, the Maple Leaf Rag III and IV, La Bloga, Latinos in Lotus Land, Poets of the American West, Strange Cargo, El Tecolote, 200 New Mexico Poems, and Southern Poetry Anthology. Melinda Palacio grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans.

For more information, please visit: http://melindapalacio.com/Melinda_Palacio/Melinda_Palacio.html

Welcome

The Latino Literary Cultures Project / Proyecto culturas literarias latinas is an interdisciplinary initiative at UC Santa Cruz that studies and promotes creative writing by and about U.S. Latinas and Latinos, past and present. Since 2006, it has brought students and scholars together with writers, translators, reviewers, and librarians through a major biennial conference, as well as smaller events on topics like Latinos and new media. The Project is particularly interested in the inventive uses of multiple languages; in the global circulation and translation of Latino culture; and in the ways that new forms of literacy and attention in the digital age are changing the relationship of text to visual and sound media. The Latino Literary Cultures Project is the only established research group in the U.S. with such a focus.