We are delighted to announce that author and Professor Cristina Rivera Garza will deliver the 2024 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series on April 11th, 2024 at 5 PM. A Q&A will follow Garza’s lecture.
Professor Cristina Rivera Garza is an author, translator and critic. Recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth, 2023), which was long listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The Taiga Syndrome, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, (Dorothy Project, 2018) was awarded the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award. Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle for Criticism. In 2020, she was a MacArthur Fellow and is currently Artist-In-Residence at DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in Berlin. She is M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies.
The Bedri Distinguished Writer Series was created to provide funds for the Department of English to bring contemporary writers working in narrative fiction or creative nonfiction to the Berkeley campus annually for a short stay. Nominees for the program are chosen from the finalists or winners of the Nobel, Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle, Man Booker, or their equivalents. Over a two day visit, invited authors will participate in small setting discussions to be offered in the English Department, and then deliver a keynote talk at a public venue.
The series has two primary goals: a) to stir excitement, reflection and conversation in the Department of English; b) to give all Berkeley students, alumni and community members within the University’s milieu the opportunity to attend the keynote address. See here for information on the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series.