About the participants (in alphabetical order)

Abouth the participants (in alphabetical order)

Filomeno Ballumbrosio, “Meno”, is the first son of Don Amador Ballumbrosio, a great Afro-Peruvian musician. Filomeno Ballumbrosio brings the rich musical culture of his homeland. Emerging from the renowned Ballumbrosio family of performers, Filomeno’s specialties include singing, dancing, playing congas and cajon (wooden box). A resident of Houston, Texas, Filomeno has performed at a number of different shows in various cities of the United States: Tucson, Chicago, Washington D.C., New York, Houston and Austin. In the 1980s, he played with rock star Miki Gonzalez in Lima, Peru. In the United States he has played with guitarist Dan Voll in “Combo Loco,” a group of Latin Jazz. 

Enrique Bernales Albites (Lima, 1975) has published: Inmanencia (1998), Inmanencia: Regreso a Ourobórea (1999), 21 poemas/Cerridwen (2003), and the novel  Los territorios ocupados (2008). He has also co-edited the anthology Los relojes se han roto: poesía peruana de los noventas (2005). Bernales is co-founder and editor of Intermezzo Tropical, a Latin American literary review. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Studies at Boston University.

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His research focuses on literary fiction, public culture, and market economy in Latin America; poetry, economics and politics; and indigenous radio and poetry in the Americas. He recently published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2007), and also co-edited a volumen of essays, entitled El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura y mercado en América Latina (with Alvaro Fernández-Bravo and Alejandra Laera; Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007). With José Antonio Mazzotti, he co-edited a special issue of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana on “Poesía, crítica y globalización cultural en las Américas” (2003). He has also published several essays in academic journals in the United States and Latin America.

Yolanda Chávez-Cappellini is currently teaching as Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at SUNY, New Paltz. Her teaching focuses on Latin American Culture, Spanish American Colonial Literature, and Linguistics. She will earn her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in Spanish with concentration on Latin American Cultural Studies. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Linguistics from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and the University of Florida, respectively. Her interests are mainly focused on discourse analysis and interdisciplinary studies, including the study of non-literary documents as a source for historical, linguistic, and literary manifestations, particularly during the Colonial period in Peru. She is also interested in the literary and artistic production during the first half of the 20th century in Peru. She has participated in several national and international conferences and collaborated with the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture.

Luis Chávez Rodríguez was born in Chirimoto, a small town in Amazonas, Peru.  He received a bachelor's degree in Hispanic American Literature at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru, and a Master of Arts in Latin American Literature from Boston University. He is currently writing his thesis, entitled "Representations of the Amazon in Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo by Cesar Calvo," in completion of his requirements for the Doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Boston University. He teaches courses at Boston University and UMASS Boston. He has been published in anthologies of poetry such as Ceremonia de Interiores (Lima: Grano de arena, 1996) and La alineación de los planetas: siete poetas peruanos en Boston (Boston: Asaltoalcielo/editores, 2005). In 1999, he published a collection of his own poetry entitled, La caza del colibrí (Boston: Asaltoalcielo/editores.) Luis is also the founder of “The Chirimoto-Amazon project: The Hummingbird House” (http://people.bu.edu/ewbexec), a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve education and raise environmental awareness in his hometown in the Peruvian Amazon.

Sandro Chiri (Peru) completed a B.A. in literature from the University of San Marcos and an M.A. from Temple University. He lives in the city of Philadelphia since 2004. His latest book is Philadelphia Poems (2006). Chiri has edited Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en el aula: nuevas lecturas (2007), El Cuento en San Marcos (2002, with Carlos Eduardo Zavaleta), and volume 2 of Mujer, Cultura y Sociedad en América Latina (2000). He directs the arts and literature magazine La Casa de Cartón.

Michelle Clayton holds a joint appointment in the departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection between Latin American and comparative studies, with a particular grounding in the international avant-gardes. She recently completed her first book project, Provincial of the World: César Vallejo and the Reach of Poetry, which examines the Peruvian writer’s poetry and prose in the light of the broader Latin American and European avant-gardes and contemporary theory. In 2008-09 she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University, working on a new project which studies the place of dance in the avant-gardes as medium and metaphor for the transnational circulation of culture.

Enrique Cortez received his B.A. in Literature from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru (2002) and holds his M.A. in Hispanic Literature from Temple University, Philadelphia (2007). His research focus includes colonial and postcolonial studies, intellectual history and Latin American fiction. At present he is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Literature and Cultural Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

Clayton Eshleman's most recent publications include The Grindstone of Rapport (a Clayton Eshleman Reader, from Black Widow Press), Archaic Design (prose, prose poems, notes, interviews, also from Black Widow Press), The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (with Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, from University of California Press), and Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press). Eshleman lives with his wife in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he is Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University. His website is: www.claytoneshleman.com  and his email address is spidermind@comcast.net

Associate Professor Rocío Ferreira’s scholarly work concentrates on modern and contemporary Latin American literatures, cultures, and visual arts. Her main areas of teaching and research focus on 19th, 20th and 21st century narratives; on gender studies; and on the formation of national literary culture in Latin America. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and has been on the faculty of DePaul University in Chicago since 2000. She has presented her work widely in national and international conferences, and she is the author of numerous essays in specialized journals. Her forthcoming book De las veladas literarias a la cocina ecléctica: mujeres, cultura y nación en el Perú decimonónico examines two areas, nineteenth century women's writings and cultural production beyond the scope of the metropolitan center Lima, which serve as the basis for a major reevaluation of literary production in that period. Her current interdisciplinary book-length research project entitled Yuyanapaq/Para Recordar/To Remember: Memory, Displacement, and Political Violence in Contemporary Peruvian Culture addresses the fundamental question of recent cultural responses (performances, literature, films and visual arts) to the Peruvian “dirty war” history (1980-2000) that resist amnesia. Dr. Ferreira’s goal is to shed light on the diverse ways in which culture has resisted silencing, oblivion, and indifference, and has constructed alternative approaches to the understanding of traumatic reality through innovative reflections on the transmission of social memory.

James Iffland is the author of Quevedo and the Grotesque (2 volumes, 1978 and 1982), Ensayos sobre la poesía revolucionaria de Centroamérica (1994), and De fiestas y aguafiestas: risa, locura e ideología en Cervantes y Avellaneda (1999). He is also editor of Francisco de Quevedo's picaresque novel El buscón (1988) and Quevedo in Perspective: Eleven Essays for the Quadricentennial (1982), and co-editor of El “Quijote” desde América (2006). Professor Iffland was also worked extensively on Central American revolutionary poetry. He is currently Head of the Spanish Section in the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University.

Giancarla Di Laura received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2004. Her dissertation focused on “Ironía en la novelística de Julio Ramón Ribeyro.” She has taught Spanish language an Latin American literature at different institutions in Illinois, Wisconsin and Kansas. Di Laura is currently an Assistant Professor at Prairie View A & M University, Texas. She has delivered papers on Latin American fiction, drama and poetry in several international conferences. Her latest research project is on the polemic Peruvian “Movimiento Kloaka”, about which she plans to write a book.

Manuel Liendo Seminario studied Hispanic Literature in Lima at the National University of San Marcos. He also studied Education at La Facultad de Teología Pontifícia y Civil de Lima. His poetry has been published in anthologies and journals both internationally and in his native country of Peru. He has recently recorded a musical tribute to César Vallejo´s poetry called “Cantares de Vallejo.” His published poetry works include Leopoldo relata  (2007), Tanto enamorarse para morir (anthology, 2004), Tanto enamorarse para morir, first-edition published in Boston (1999), and De partisanos y otras mudanzas, with a prologue by Enrique Lihn (1988).

José Antonio Mazzotti is Professor of Latin American Literature and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University. He is also President of the International Association of Peruvianists since 1996. Mazzotti has published Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: resonancias andinas (1996), Poéticas del flujo: migración y violencia verbales en el Perú de los 80 (2002), Incan Insights: El Inca Garcilaso’s Hints to Andean Readers (2008), and several volumes of poetry, which include: Poemas no recogidos en libro (1981), Fierro curvo: órbita poética (1985), Castillo de popa (1988 and 1991), El libro de las auroras boreales (1995), Señora de la Noche (1998), El zorro y la luna. Antología poética 1981-1999 (1999), and Sakra Boccata (2006 and 2007). He has also edited Agencias criollas: la ambigüedad “colonial” en las letras hispanoamericanas (2000), "Discurso en Loor de la Poesía". Estudio y edición, by Antonio Cornejo Polar (2000), and co-edited The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States (2007), Edición e interpretación de textos andinos (2000), and Asedios a la heterogeneidad cultural. Libro de homenaje a Antonio Cornejo Polar (1996). 

A native of Peru, Professor Julio Ortega is an accomplished scholar, poet, playwright, and novelist, with 15 books as well as several critical editions to his credit. After six years of teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, and two years as professor and chairperson at Brandeis University, Professor Ortega joined Brown University's Department of Hispanic Studies in 1989. He has also been a visiting professor at numerous universities both in the United States and abroad, including terms as Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (1995-96) and Cátedra de Estudios Avanzados at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (Summer 1995). Professor Ortega's publications include (i) literary criticism: Retrato de Carlos Fuentes (1995), Arte de innovar (1994), El discurso de la abundancia (1992), Una poética del cambio (1992), Reapropriaciones: Cultura y literatura en Puerto Rico (1991); (ii) fiction: La mesa del padre (1995), Ayacucho, Good Bye (1994), Canto de hablar materno (1992); (iii) editions: The Picador Book of Latin American Short Stories, edited with Carlos Fuentes (1998), La Cervantiada (1995), Venezuela: fin de siglo (1994), and Rayuela de Julio Cortazar (1993).

Domingo de Ramos (Ica, Peru, 1960) studied Sociology at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and was co-founder of the literary group “Movimiento Kloaka” in 1982. His books of poetry include Arquitectura del espanto (1988), Pastor de perros (1993), Luna Serrada (1995), Ósmosis (1996), Las cenizas de Altamira (1999), Erótika de Klase (2004), and Pastor de perros: breve antología (2006).

Róger Santiváñez (Piura, Peru, 1956) received his Ph.D. from Temple University in 2007. He has published Antes de la muerte (1979), Homenaje para iniciados (1984), Symbol (1991), Cor Cordium (1995), Dolores morales de Santiváñez (2006) and Labranda (2008), among other poetry collections. He was one of the co-founders of the renowned “Movimiento Kloaka” in Lima in 1982. He is currently teaching Latin American literature at Princeton University. 

Alan Smith is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University. His teaching and research interests include Galdós, Lorca, contemporary Spanish poetry, Cervantes, César Vallejo, and the theory of aesthetics in literature and the plastic arts. His publications include a critical first edition of Rosalía, a lost novel by Benito Pérez Galdós (Cátedra, 1983, 1984); an edition of Galdós's Cuentos fantásticos (Cátedra, 1996); Los relatos inverosímiles de Benito Pérez Galdós en el contexto de su obra (Anthropos, 1992), a study of Galdós' fantastic short stories; and his most recent book, Galdós y la imaginación mitológica (Cátedra, 2005). His poetry has been anthologized in Poetas sin fronteras (Madrid: Verbum 2000) and Sabia savia (Segovia: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, 2006), and has appeared in various magazines world-wide. His book of poems, Fragmentos de alcancía, was published in 1998.

Claret Vargas received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. She was assistant professor of Latin American literature at the University of Miami and is currently a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, focusing on human rights advocacy. Her essays have appeared in Neophilologus ("A poetics of bafflement: ethics and the representation of the other in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry"), Hispanic Review, La République des Idées, and will be appearing in the Archives de Philosophie du Droit (Dalloz). Her essay on "The Persistence of Distance in the Poetry of Eduardo Mitre." appeared in José Falconi and José Mazzotti's The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States. She is currently working on a review of contemporary Just War theory in light of the Las Casas/Sepúlveda polemic, and on a comparative study of strategic litigation in Latin America and the United States.

Carlos Villacorta (Lima, 1976) studied Hispanic Literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In 1998, he was part of “Inmanencia”, a poetry group, with whom he published Inmanencia (1998) and Inmanencia: Regreso a Ourobórea (1999). He was invited to the Primer Junio de Poesía (Mexico City, 2000) and Encuentro de Jóvenes Escritores (Cuzco, 2004). He also has published El grito (2001), Tríptico (2003) and Ciudad Satélite (2007). He was editor of Odumodneurtse!, a Peruvian newspaper focused on contemporary poetry. He has co-edited the anthology Los relojes se han roto: Antología peruana de los noventa (Guadalajara, 2005). A selection of his poems has appeared in Hostos Review / Revista hostosiana - Destellos Digitales: Escritores Peruanos en los Estados Unidos 1970-2005. He has published several essays in different literary journals. He lives in Boston since 2004 and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Literature at Boston University.

Tino Villanueva is the author of six books of poetry, among them Shaking Off the Dark (1984); Crónica de mis años peores (1987); Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993), which won a 1994 American Book Award; and Primera causa First Cause (1999), a chapbook on memory and writing. Villanueva has been anthologized in An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1989), and Poetas sin fronteras (2000). His art work has appeared on the covers and pages of national and international journals, such as Nexos (Mexico City), Green Mountains Review, TriQuarterly, and Parnassus.