On Monday, November 5 in the Dogwood Room of the Indiana Memorial Union, Carmen Boullosa will speak about her life as a writer and her work as a journalist. Boullosa is the author of seventeen novels, fifteen collections of poetry, plays, shorts stories and screenplays. She was recipient of the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Several of Boullosa’s seventeen novels have been translated into English, including They’re Cows, We’re Pigs and Texas: The Great Theft. Boullosa has taught at the Sorbonne, Georgetown University, Columbia University, and is now Professor at CUNY, where she also is co-host of the Emmy-award-winning CUNY.TV show, Nueva York.

Carmen Boullosa is a CAHI Distinguished Speaker, and her visit is co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and American Literary Translators Association (she will appear with several of her translators on Saturday November 3 at the ALTA Meeting in Bloomington).

Monrovia, Indiana explores a small town in rural, mid-America and illustrates how values like community service, duty, spiritual life, generosity and authenticity are formed, experienced and lived along with conflicting stereotypes. The film gives a complex and nuanced view of daily life in Monrovia and provides some understanding of a way of life whose influence and force have not always been recognized or understood in the big cities on the east and west coasts of America and in other countries.