The University of Wisconsin Press
Press kit for Scenes from la Cuenca
Author's bio | Author's extended bio | Author's bio - Español | Author's photo | Cover image for Web sites | Cover image for print publications, higher resolution | Reviews | Excepts
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Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters “Chávez-Silverman is doing nothing less than creating a new genre . . . through the only language capable of apprehending it: Spanglish as the new language of national becoming.” Susana Chávez-Silverman is professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Pomona College in California. She is coeditor of Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad and Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture.
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Susana Chávez-Silverman, A.M. Harvard University (Romance Languages), Ph.D. UC Davis (Spanish) has taught at UCSC, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC Davis, as well as the University of South Africa before coming to Pomona College. Chávez-Silverman grew up (at least) bilingually and biculturally between Los Angeles, Madrid and Guadalajara, México, the daughter of a Jewish Hispanist and a Chicana teacher. After a peripatetic university and post-graduate career, and years spent living in Boston, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Spain and South Africa, she is currently professor of Spanish, Latino/a and Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She specializes in gender and sexuality studies, autobiography/memoir, Latin American and U.S. Latina/Chicana literature, poetry, and feminist pedagogy. She has published numerous essays on these topics and co-edited the books Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (1997) with Frances R. Aparicio, and Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture (2000) with Librada Hernández. Her first book, Killer Crónicas:Bilingual Memories, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. This collection of chronicles began in 2001, after Susana was awarded a fellowship by the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project on contemporary Argentine women's poetry. She spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires where, in addition to research and writing on her official (academic) book, she began to send bilingual, punning "letters from the southern [cone] front" to colleagues and friends by email. Susana says: "Living in Buenos Aires, that gorgeous, turn of the century city in a country on the brink of (economic) collapse-home to many of the authors and artists I had long admired (Borges, Cortázar, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, and before them the foundational Romantics, Sarmiento and Echeverría)-brought out a sense of self, dis/placed yet oddly at home, in a cultural, linguistic and even tangible way. In Buenos Aires, the fragmented parts of me, the voices, cultures, and places inside of me, rubbed up against each other and struck fire. I called my email missives "Crónicas," inspired by the somewhat rough-hewn, journalistic, often fantastic first-hand accounts sent "home" by the early conquistadores, and refashioned by modern-day counterparts such as Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Cristina Pacheco." One of Susana's crónicas, "Anniversary Crónica," inspired by the June 16th anniversary of both Susana's parents' wedding and that of the so-called "Soweto Riots" in South Africa, was recently awarded First prize in Personal Memoir in the "Chicano Literary Excellence Contest" sponsored by the U.S. national literary magazine el Andar. Susana Chávez Silverman --Maestría de Harvard University
(Lenguas Románicas) Ha enseñado en la Univ. de California
Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Irvine y Davis. También en UNISA
(la Univ. de Sudáfrica). Ha publicado ensayos y capítulos sobre estos temas y co-editado los libros Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Dartmouth 1997) con Frances R. Aparicio y Reading & Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture (Wisconsin 2000) con Librada Hernández. Su libro, Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories, se publicará por la University of Wisconsin press en Sept. 2004. Esta colección de crónicas comenzó en el 2001, después de que Susana fue becada por la NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) para un proyecto sobre la poesía argentina contemporánea de mujeres. Pasó 13 meses en Buenos Aires donde, además de la inverstigación para su libro "oficial" (académico), ella comenzó a mandar cartas a amigos y colegas por Email. La autora dice: "Vivir en Buenos Aires, esa hermosa ciudad de fin de siglo(s), al borde del colapse (económico)-país y ciudad de tantos de los autores que yo había admirado desde mi adolescencia (Borges, Cortázar, Storni, Pizarnik, y los románticos fundacionales: Sarmiento y Echeverría)-provocó en mí un sentido de mi ser, de mi yo des/plazado pero de alguna forma también extrañamente heimlich, "at home," un sentirse en casa cultural, lingüístico y hasta tangible. Bauticé "crónicas" estas misivas electrónicas, inspirada en las llamadas Crónicas de Indias de los conquistadores, y también en las crónicas contemporáneas de Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska y Cristina Pacheco, entre otros." Una de los textos de Susana, "Anniversary
Crónica," inspirada en el aniversario de boda de
sus padres (fecha que coincide con los llamados motines estudiantiles
en Soweto, el 16 de junio), ganó el Primer Premio en el
"Concurso de Excelencia Literaria Chicana" (2002),
patrocinado por la revista literaria "el andar" (USA). “These diverse passions—trees, a lover, perfume, astral signs, chronic panic attacks, an all-abiding love for friends and the sounds of the streets of San Francisco, all make her so endearing. After the alarms and diversions, it is these passions that drive her story . . . drive her . . . make it hard for those of us on either side of the border to ever be able to forget her y su poder.”—Carlos Amantea, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities. “Chavez-Silverman breaks out of ‘proper’ language and writes the way she speaks and hears language spoken. . . .To translate into a single tongue would be to lose something essential about Chavez-Silverman’s voice, and her identity. Even if you can’t parse everything, I hope you think it’s chévere.”—Open Salon “By sharing her story in a stream-of-consciousness manner, Chaves-Silverman inspires readers to evaluate their perceptions of ethnicity, meanwhile highlighting the versatility of language.”––ForeWord Reviews “A love story about how language can bring us closer to each other, not by shared codes of national investments in a monolingual and monological U.S. cultural identity, but by reminding us how language re-creates us through our willingness to create love out of loss, distance, and across the limits of geography.”—Lázaro Lima, Bryn Mawr College One of those rare things in contemporary writing, a truly bilingual enterprise. The weaving between English and Spanish is made even more remarkable by the narrative’s unpredictable globe-hopping and time-shifting qualities. Readers will breathtakingly enter Susana Chávez-Silverman’s world and confront their own conceptions of boundaries, borders, languages, memories, and spaces. Excerpts |
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