The Virus of Here and Now: Bilingual Poetry Reading with Cristina Rivera Garza

The Cervantes Chair at the University of Edinburgh presents “The Virus Here and Now”, a literary event featuring a bilingual reading of poems by acclaimed Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza.

Rivera Garza will be joined by Ilana Luna, Professor of Hispanic Studies, for a conversation exploring her work, creative process, and the themes that shape her writing. This dialogue between the poet and the professor will be open to questions from the audience.

Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, Mexico, 1964) is a Mexican writer, historian, and professor whose formally innovative work has reshaped contemporary Spanish literature. For more than two decades, her fiction and essays have explored gendered violence, memory, the body, language, and the U.S.–Mexico border through hybrid forms that weave archival research with intimate narrative.

She is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice and a MacArthur Fellow (2020), and has received major international prizes, including the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (twice), the Anna Seghers Prize, and the Roger Caillois Award. Her books available in English include No One Will See Me Cry, The Iliac Crest, The Taiga Syndrome, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, New and Selected Stories, and the novel Autobiography of Cotton, recently published by Graywolf Press. She is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Ilana Luna is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Arizona State University and a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is an author, editor and translator of poetry and prose, as well as curator of public literary and film festivals.