S261. CANCELLED: Documenting the Undocumented: Writing the U.S./Mexico Border across Genres

Status: Not Accepted

Room 213, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, March 7, 2020
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm

 

The border. ICE. The wall. Asylum. Human cages. How can we truthfully represent the current “immigration crisis at the border” in our writing? What are political and philosophical concerns, particularly when authors inherit stories they are in effect, still living, and when readers might expect a happy ending? Authors across categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young adult and children’s books—talk frankly about the struggles and importance of writing “la frontera.”


Participants

Moderator:

Jennifer De Leon is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From and the editor of Wise Latinas. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University, and a GrubStreet board member.

Javier Zamora is a 2018–2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Lannan Foundation, the NEA, Poetry Foundation, and Stanford. His poems appear in Kenyon Review, Poetry, and The New York Times. He is the author of Unaccompanied.

Mexican writer Reyna Grande is the author of the novels Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies, which received several awards including an American Book Award. Her memoir, The Distance between Us, is about her life before and after illegally immigrating from Mexico to the US at nine.

Ricardo Nuila is a practicing doctor, teacher, and writer. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker and VQR, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories. A former Yaddo, MacDowell, and Dobie Ranch fellow, his first book is on safety net hospitals.

René Colato Laínez is an award-winning author of many bilingual/multicultural children's books. He has a master's degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children & Young Adults. He is an elementary bilingual teacher.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center