Co-organizers

Jacqueline Loss

Jacqueline Loss (PhD, 2000, Comparative Literature, University of Texas-Austin) teaches Spanish and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Her book Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place was published by Palgrave in December 2005. She is the co-editor of an anthology of Cuban short stories to be published by Northwestern University Press in 2007 and is an advisory editor of Literature from the "Axis of Evil" Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations. Among the writers she has translated into English are Cubans Víctor Fowler Calzada. Ernesto René Rodríguez, and Jorge Miralles. Her critical essays have appeared in Nepantla:Views from South, Miradas (Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños), Chasqui, Latino and Latina Writers, Mandorla, and New Centennial Review, among other publications. She is currently preparing a manuscript whose working title is “Cultural Memory: Cuba and the Soviet Bloc.”

José Manuel Prieto González

José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. He earned his PhD in History at the Universidad Autónoma de México and taught at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, México City, from 1994 to 2004. In 2004-2005, he was the Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in The New York Public Library. Prieto has been the recipient of fellowships from the Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México, from January 2003 to December 2005; the Santa Maddalena Foundation, in Florence, Italy, in April 2001; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2002.

Prieto is an author of several novels, non-fiction books, articles and essays, and he is also a translator from Russian Literature to Spanish. Among his books are Livadia (Mondadori, Barcelona, 1998), Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (Mondadori, Barcelona, 2003), El Tartamudo y la rusa (Tusquets, México 2002), Treinta días en Moscow (travel account) (Mondadori, Barcelona. 2001). Livadia has been translated into more than eight languages. In the United States, Livadia was published by Grove Press with the title Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire; in France, it was published as Papillons de nuit dans l´empire de Russie; in Italy as Le Farfalle Notturne dell´Impero Russo. Publications such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Liberation, and The Times Literary Supplement have published positive reviews of it. At the end of 2004, the prestigious 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' included Liwadjia as one of the most important books of fiction of the year in Germany.

Rex, his forthcoming novel, will come out in Spring 2007, published by Anagrama, in Barcelona, in simultaneous editions in German and French.

Currently, José Maneul Prieto lives in New York City and is the Director of the Joseph A. Unanue Latino Institute at Seton Hall University.