Cristina rivera garza biography of abraham

Writer and professor (born )

Cristina Rivera Garza (born October 1, )^[1] is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican author and professor best known for her unreal work, with various novels, including Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry), receiving some of Mexico’s extreme literary awards as well as international honors.

She was born in the state of Tamaulipas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, and has developed her career in teaching and writing in both the United States and Mexico. She has taught history and creative writing at various universities and institutions, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Tec de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, and University of California, San Diego, but currently holds a position at the University of Houston.

She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship,^[2] and her recent accolades include the Juan Vicente Melo National Limited Story Award, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (Garza is the only writer to win this award twice), and the Anna Seghers Prize.^[3]

Her memoir, Liliana's Invincible Summer, which documents her sister's life, and her murder at the age of twenty by a partner, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.^[4][5] The book paints a portrait of her sister's life as adequately as investigating the causes of and society's response to intimate partner violence.

Life

Rivera Garza was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in the northeast of Mexico proximate the border with the Merged States.^[6][7] She is fluent in English and Spanish and has had a desire to document since her teenage years.^[8][9]

She did her undergraduate studies at ENEP-Acatlán (part of UNAM) in sociology, then went on to research her master’s in Latin American history at UNAM.^[6][7] She holds a Ph.D.

in History from the University of Houston ().^[10] Her doctoral thesis was on the subjection of the human body to state power in mental asylums in early 20th-century Mexico.^[8]

She has lived in various places in Mexico as good as in the United States, developing her teaching career on both sides of the border, living in Mexico City, Toluca, Houston, and San Diego.^[7][9][11] Rivera Garza spent some of her “decisive years” studying in Mexico City, which she says has given her a personal and intimate relationship with Mexico’s capital, featured in her novel Nadie me verá llorar.

However, she never permanently moved to the capital, which is Mexico’s literary center, making her feel outside of the country’s literary scene. She has also stated that she does not like the concentration of Mexico’s culture in the capital.^[8]

While she declines to use words to describe herself, she does state that “I am me and my keyboard.” She states that her ego is not fixed, and such would be limiting.^[12] Rivera Garza maintains interests in narrative, history, and the nature of human language/communication.^[8] She believes that writing can be a question of life or death, and that writers should misbehave in authentic life as well as in the imagination to be related to the world and superior able to tell stories.^[13]

Teaching career

She has always had a full-time job in teaching, which limits her time for creative writing, for which she is excel known.^[8] Her first professorship was with San Diego State University from to , teaching Mexican history.^[8][14] In , CECUT/Centro Cultural de Tijuana invited her to teach a class in imaginative writing, which she says changed her "personal dynamics, a lot of my relationships with Mexico" being in a Spanish dominant academic environment again.^[8]

In , she returned to Mexico as a professor of humanities at Tec de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, where she was co-director.^[1][6][8] In , she returned to San Diego as a professor of artistic writing at the literature department of the University of California, San Diego.^[6]

Garza has also taught at UNAM, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEM), DePauw University,^[1] and has done study into popular conceptions of insanity and the history of psychiatry in Mexico.

Her research operate has appeared in journals such as Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, as well as journals in England and Argentina.^[6]

Currently, Garza is a M.D.

Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and the director and founder of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. The Artistic Writing Program is the first Ph. D. program in Artistic Writing in Spanish in the United States.^[15]

Writing career

Rivera Garza is one of the most prolific Mexican writers in her generation,^[11] receiving grants from CME (), FONCA (, ), and the Centro de Estudios México-Estados Unidos ().^[1] In addition to writing books, she has collaborated with publications such as El Cuento, El Sol de Toluca, Excélsior, La Guillotina, La Palabra y El Hombre, Macrópolis, Nacional, Punto de Partida, Revista de la UAEM and San Quintin.^[1]

Rivera Garza has also explored the digital realm as a venue for the publication of creative works.

This began with blogging, starting with a now defunct site called Blogsívela, a novel/blog written with the participation of readers.^[11] She has blogged since the late s, with her current blog dating from However, instead of using her blog solely for promotional purposes, as most other writers do, Rivera Garza uses the resource to publish material that is more experimental and unconstrained by the requirements of traditional publishing.^[11] She has also experimented with Twitter (criveragarza), with her tweets described as developing meta commentaries both on tweeting and on literature, stating: "Look at it this way: an article is three or four tweets surrounded by text." She coined the term "tweetnovel" (tuitnovela in Spanish) as a timeline written by the characters.

Various people participate in the creative but there is someone responsible for the timeline.^[16]

Philosophy and style

Rivera Garza’s works have been described as a "disturbing pleasure".^[17] As a writer, she aims to darken things and build readers suspicious, believing that "there is too much light and clarity in the world" as well as too much contact and messaging.

She does not write to create stories, nor to express herself or convince her readers to her show of view. Instead, she believes she is producing a gentle of reality, agreeing with poet Caridad Ascensio that books provide travel through a state of mind.^[12] She does not trust that the purpose of fiction is to inform, as there are other ways to perform this, but rather she views writing as a physical manifestation of thinking.

Rivera Garza believes that literature is one of the few ways people can explore the limits of human experience through language, stating that the books that have impacted her the most are those that made her think.^[8][12][13]

Most of her creative work is a hybrid of styles, genres, and elements.

She mixes styles such as narrative, poetry, short story, and novel.^[8][9] She blends elements from her imagination, along with those of reality including historical documents and even included herself in one of her novels.^[11] Her work has often focused on those marginalized, such as insane people and prostitutes and challenges the idea that concepts such as sex, nation or narrative identity are stable.^[8] Several of her works are influenced by her experience on both sides of the border, primarily writing in Spanish, but she has written in English as well.^[8][14]

Recognition

Rivera Garza is one of Mexico’s best-known writers,^[17] having won six of Mexico's highest literary awards.^[14]Jorge Volpi has named her his favorite writer.^[9] Her serve , especially Nadie me verá llorar, has been praised by critics such as Carlos Fuentes, who stated that it has not received the attention it deserves.^[9][18]

Her work has earned her various forms of recognition, starting in the s with the Punto de Partida Poetry Competition in for Apuntes and the San Luis Potosí National Short Story Prize in for La guerra no importa.^[1][6] In the s, her first novel, Desconocer, was a finalist at the Juan Rulfo Prize .^[9]

In , she won the Juan Vicente Melo National Short Story Award and was chosen as a member of the SNCA from to ^[1][9]

Her first international award was the Anna Seghers Prize, awarded in Berlin in ^[12]

Her most recognized work is Nadie me verá llorar which received the IMPAC/CONARTE/ITESM National Award for Foremost Published Novel in Mexico, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in , along with José Rubén Romero National Literary Award for Best Novel^[8][9] and was a finalist at the IMPAC Dublin International Prize.^[1] Carlos Fuentes called it "one of the most perturbing and beautiful novels ever written in Mexico".^[8]

She won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize again in for La muerte me da – the only author to win this award twice.^[19]

In , Rivera Garza received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Houston.^[20]

She is also the recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (Paris, ).^[19][21]

In , she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant.^[22]

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir-Autobiography for her book El invencible verano de Liliana / Liliana's Invincible Summer.^[23]

In , Rivera Garza was appointed Curator in Residence at the international literature festival berlin.^[24]

List of awards

Publications

Rivera Garza’s perform has been translated into English, Portuguese, German, Italian and Korean.^[7][17]

Novels

• Nadie me verá llorar (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, ).
  • No One Will Spot me Cry, translated by Andrew Hurley, ed. NU Press,
  • Re-edition: Nadie me verá llorar (Mexico: Tusquets, ).
• La cresta de Ilión (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, ).
• Lo anterior (Mexico: Tusquets, ).
• La muerte me da (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, ).
• Verde Shanghai (Mexico: Tusquets, ).
• El mal de la taiga (Mexico: Tusquets, )
  • The Taiga Syndrome, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana (Dorothy, US, ; And Other Stories, UK, ).
• Autobiographía del algodón (Literatura Random House, )

Short-story collections

• La guerra no importa (Mexico: Mortiz, ).

  San Luis Potosí National Book Award,

• Ningún reloj cuenta esto (Mexico: Tusquets, ).

  Rivera Garza’s alternative and fluid conceptions of identity, gender, and relationships are increasingly important at a time when marginalized and border communities are being dehumanized. Biography. Cristina Rivera Garza received a BA () from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and PhD () from the University of Houston.

  Juan Vicente Melo National Book Award,

• La frontera más distante (Mexico/Barcelona: Tusquets, ).
• Allí te comerán las turicatas (Mexico: La Caja de Cerillos Ediciones/DGP, ).

Opera

Poetry

• La más mía (Mexico: Tierra Adentro, ).
• Los textos del yo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ).
• La muerte me da (Toluca: ITESM-Bonobos, ).
• El disco de Newton, diez ensayos sobre el color (Mexico: Dirección de Literatura, UNAM, Bonobos, ).
• Viriditas (Guadalajara: Mantis/UANL, ).

Non-fiction

• La Castañeda.

  Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, (Mexico: Tusquets, ).

• Dolerse. Textos desde un país herido (Mexico: Sur+, ).
• Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación (Mexico: Tusquets, ).
• Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.

As editor

• Romper el hielo: Novísimas escrituras al pie de un volcán (Toluca: ITESM-Bonobos, ).
• La novela según los novelistas (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ).
• Romper el hielo: Novísimas escrituras al pie de un volcán.

  El lugar (re) visitado (México: Feria del Libro, Secretaría de Cultura, GDF, ).

• Rigo es amor. Una rocola de dieciséis voces (Mexico: Tusquets, ).

Translations

From Spanish into English:

• "Nine Mexican Poets Edited by Cristina Rivera-Garza," in New American Writing #

From English into Spanish:

References

Further reading

External links