In her book The Volcano Daughters, Gina María Balibrera’s work creates a textured and nuanced landscape of 1932 El Salvador. There’s a sense of reclamation within the novel, whether it be Salvadoran legends that are subverted, or the use of Spanish language (specifically Salvadoran unique words) unapologetically throughout the novel. Balibrera writes, “the word makes the world,” and in this conversation, she will discuss reclaiming language and the archival labor required to write her first book — how she decided when to deviate from the already written, when to reclaim and mythologize, and when to withhold or require the reader to witness. At the end of the program, Balibrera will offer some generative prompts to help writers approach these same questions and techniques.
Gina María Balibrera is the author of the novel The Volcano Daughters, which was a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. She earned an MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and has been awarded grants and fellowships from Aspen Words, Tin House, and the Periplus Collective, and her work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pleiades, The Wandering Song: An Anthology of the Central American Diaspora, and elsewhere. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in Ann Arbor, MI, with her family.
Tanya Shirazi Galvez is a PhD student in Fiction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her writing has received support from Tin House, Catapult, Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown, Kenyon, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and Valparaiso Fundacion. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in The Audacity, Huizache, and PubLab. Her work explores psychic hauntings and the darkness of girlhood. She is Senior Editor at Aster(ix) Journal. She is Los Angeles born, Lynwood raised, Las Vegas based.