Latina Authors Project

One of my favorite courses, among the many offerings in Hispanic Studies at EC, is titled "Contemporary Latina Literature," featuring different literary genres written originally in English, concerned with the Latinx experience, and expressed from the female point of view. The course features works by Julia Álvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer and Ana Mendéndez. Since the literature is written in English, students can take the course for English credit and complete all their work in English. Because the topic is pertinent to Hispanic Studies, students who can write in Spanish, do so, and get credit in Spanish. Hence, the bilingual nature of what you are about to see.

In the 2020 Winter Term some of my students in the course and some students who study art at EC participated in what came to be the "Latina Authors Project." Jan Kather organized art students interested in drawing portraits of "our authors" and some of my students wrote blurbs on each author/work we studied. I have taken the liberty to combine certain blurbs in order to create the most complete description of each author rendered by my students. All blurbs were edited a bit by me, both the English and the Spanish versions. The final result is what you see here: visual representations of six Latina authors based on photographs of them and bilingual descriptions of who they are through their writing.

We meant to exhibit the project on campus in the Gannett-Tripp Library at the beginning of Spring Term, but bigger things took over. Undeterred, we created this virtual exhibit instead, and hope you enjoy it, learn about this diverse group of authors, and maybe even feel compelled to read one or two. A big shout out to my budding literature scholars: Timothy Cooper, Kate Gibson, and Max Lundin. And my deep gratitude to Jan Kather for making it all happen; as well as to her very talented and generous students: Jenna Cowder, Amayia Giscombe, Max Lundin, Lucy Shemo, Alexander Taylor, and Kristen Tull.

Lauren Shaw

Associate Professor,

Spanish & Hispanic Studies

Elmira College