The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation

Cristina Rivera Garza is one of the most important writers in the Spanish language today. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. She has previously held academic appointments in the history department at San Diego State University and in the creative writing program at the University of California-San Diego, as well as in the Tecnológico de Monterrey-Campus Toluca in Mexico City. She has also been a visiting scholar in various institutions including Stanford University and Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of six novels, three of which have been translated into English: No One Will See Me Cry (Tusquets 2001; Curbstone Press 2003); The Illiac Crest (Tusquets 2002; Literatura Random House 2018; And Other Stories, 2018; The Feminist Press, 2018); and The Taiga Syndrome (2012; 2018; 2019). She is also the author of three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry, and three books of non-fiction, including The Restless Dead (Tusquets 2012; Debolsillo 2020). She has been awarded the Roger Caillois Prize for Latin American literature in France and the Anna Seghers Award in Germany. She is the only author to have been twice awarded the Sor Juana Prize, Mexico’s most important recognition for women writers. Rivera Garza is also a trained historian, holding a Ph.D. in the discipline from the University of Houston. Rivera Garza has translated important works into Spanish, most recently The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based translator and poet. She is among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest held by Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming from the Kenyon Review, The Common, the Harvard Review, Two Lines, the Literary Review, The Offing, Waxwing, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other publications. In 2009, she was named a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Recent book-length translations include Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (Cardboard House Press, 2018), Empty Pool by Isabel Zapata (Editorial Argonáutica, 2019), Manca by Juana Adcock (Editorial Argonáutica, 2019), Lessons in Critical Theory by Carlos Aguirre Rojas (Peter Lang Publishing, forthcoming), Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press, forthcoming), and Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books, forthcoming).

SHORT BIOS
Author, translator, and critic Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of six novels, three of which have been translated into English: No One Will See Me Cry (2001; 2003); The Illiac Crest (2002; 2018); and The Taiga Syndrome (2012; 2018; 2019). She is the founder of the Program in Creative Writing in Spanish and distinguished professor at the University of Houston.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based translator and poet.