FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Las Comadres to Host 4th Annual Latino Writers Conference at New School, Creative Writing Program
Day-Long Event to Offer Access to and Guidance From Publishing Insiders
Cristina Garcia to keynote 2015 Latino Writers Conference
2015 Keynote: Cristina Garcia
New York, NY; May 26, 2015—Las Comadres para las Americas, the national Latina organization, will present a day-long conference on October 3, 2015 for Latino writers seeking book publication.
The Comadres and Compadres Writers Conference will be held at The New School, School of Writing. Joining La Comadres as collaborators are The New School, Creative Writing Program, Scholastic, Inc., Interlex, USA, Cecilia Vestalegui, The Center for Black Literature, Medgar Evers College, CUNY, National Black Writers Conference, Adriana Dominguez, and Marcela Landres, with support from the Association of American Publishers.
The conference will help attendees navigate the challenges and opportunities specific to Latino writers. Scheduled panels will focus on children’s/young adult writing, self-publishing, fiction, and non-fiction as well as craft workshops for adult and children’s books.
Two of the more popular sessions are a pitch slam and an agents/editors panel. In addition, writers will have the option to meet one-on-one with agents and editors.
The 2015 Keynote is Cristina García who will keynote at 5:00 p.m. before an evening reception. Tickets for purchase also will be available for those not attending the conference.
Cristina García is the author of six novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her recent young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, is set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s.
KING OF CUBA, her darkly comic sixth novel, features a fictionalized Fidel Castro, an octogenarian Miami exile, and a rabble of Cuban voices. NPR called it “a wicked pleasure.”
García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has taught at universities nationwide. Recently, she completed her tenure as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos and as Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.