La Luz en los tiempos de la oscuridad
Join us for two nights of stories, dance and music celebrating our guest writers
Wednesday, July 27 at 7 p.m.
Featuring: Julia Alvarez, Helena María Viramontes, Manuel Muñoz and Sandra Cisneros
Music and Dance performances by David Garza and S.T. Shimi
Jump-Start Performance Co.
Blue Star Complex (108 Blue Star)
Seating is limited, so buy your tickets early.
$25 for general admission tickets and $50 for table seating tickets
Visit www.jump-start.org to buy tickets online
Thursday, July 28 at 7 pm..
Featuring: Macondo Writers
Music: Conjunto El Trio
Thiry Auditorium–at Our Lady of the Lake University
FREE
About the Authors
Julia Alvarez
Born in New York City in 1950, Julia Alvarez considers herself to be an American though she spent the first ten years of her life in her family's native country, the Dominican Republic. In 1960, her family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic and immigrate to the United States because of Alvarez's father's involvement in an underground plot to overthrow the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina.
Her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, published in 1991, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. More novels followed: In the Time of Butterflies in 1994, iYo! in 1997, In the Name of Salomé in 2000 and Saving the World in 2006. Alvarez has written five books for children, including The Secret Footprints (2000) and How Tía Lola Came to Visit/Stay (2001), and three novels for young adults: Before We Were Free (2002), Finding Miracles (2004) and Return to Sender (2009). She has also compiled a book of her essays, Something to Declare, in 1998, and five collections of poetry including, The Woman I Kept to Myself in 2004. She and her husband, Bill Eichner, founded Alta Gracia, a sustainable farm in the Dominican Republic that produces organic coffee and also serves as a literacy center. She currently lives in Vermont, where she is a writer in residence at Middlebury College.
Helena María Viramontes
Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), a novel. Her most recent novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, just published in paperback by Washington Square Press, focuses on the dispossessed, the working poor, the homeless, and the undocumented of East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was born and raised. Her work strives to recreate the visceral sense of a world virtually unknown to mainstream letters and to transform readers through relentlessly compassionate storytelling.
In the 1980s, Viramontes became co-coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association and literary editor of XhistmeArte Magazine. Later in the decade, Viramontes helped found Southern California Latino Writers and Filmmakers. In collaboration with feminist scholar Maria Herrera Sobek, Viramontes organized three major conferences at UC-Irvine, resulting in two anthologies: Chicana Creativity and Criticism-Charting New Frontiers in American Literature (1988) and Chicana Writes: On Word and Film (1993).
Viramontes' work has been included in nearly every anthology of American literature published in the last ten years, including, most recently, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Named a USA Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Luis Leal Award. A teacher and mentor to countless young writers, Viramontes is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Cornell University.
Manuel Muñoz
Manuel Muñoz is the author of What You See in the Dark, a novel, and two collections of short stories, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and Zigzagger. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award in 2008, Manuel was a finalist for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize and the recipient of a Constance Saltonstall Foundation Individual Artist's Grant in Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize for a short story. He served as a juror for the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. A native of Dinuba, California, he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is the founder of the Macondo Foundation, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the organizer of the Latino MacArthur Fellows, los MacArturos. For over thirty years she has published poetry, novels and short stories. Her awards are several, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Texas Medal of Arts. Her House on Mango Street (1984) is required reading in schools across the nation and recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Her books have been published across the globe. Some of her recent accomplishments this year include being Grand Marshall of the Poteet Strawberry Festival and singing on stage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem (for a commencement speech).
