Beyond Borders: Writers & Translators Present: Yuri Herrera & Lisa Dillman

The Beyond Borders: Writers & Translators Reading Series is a project of the MFA for Poets & Writers' Visiting Writers Series and the Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center. This new reading series presents acclaimed writers from around the globe who write in a language other than English in conjunction with their English-language translators. 

Funding provided by the Chancellor’s Community, Democracy, and Dialogue (CDD) working group. The CDD has been created to promote dialogue, academic inquiry, and respect for difference in addressing challenging topics. These are forms of engagement central to higher education and a thriving democracy.

Additional support provided by and the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Program.

Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera is the author of three novels, including Signs Preceding the End of the World, as well as the collection Ten Planets, which was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. His first novel Trabajos del reino (in English: Kingdom Cons) won the Premio Binacional de Novela Joven 2003 and received the “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” prize for the best novel published in Spain in 2008. His second novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World) was a finalist of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. His third novel is La transmigración de los cuerpos (Transmigration of Bodies). All of these novels have been translated into English by Lisa Dillman for British publisher And Other Stories. In 2016, he and Dillman shared the Best Translated Book Award for Signs Preceding the End of the World. Herrera teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Lisa Dillman has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Abyss and The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, and Yuri Herrera’s novels. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
 

This event will be moderated by Ryan Mihaly.

Ryan Mihaly is the author of the chapbook of prose poems B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart. His co-translations of Halina Poświatowksa have appeared in Fence, Circumference, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. His numerous interviews with literary translators have appeared in Asymptote, where he served as an interviews editor. He is the Program Coordinator for the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers. 
 

Celebrating its sixty-first year, the nationally renowned Visiting Writers Series at UMass Amherst presents emerging and established writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The series is sponsored by the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action, and is made possible with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council, the Massachusetts Review, and the English Department. In addition, funding for the December 6 reading featuring Yuri Herrera and Lisa Dillman is underwritten, in part, by the Chancellor’s Community, Democracy, and Dialogue working group.