The Spring Literary Festival is pleased to welcome Helena María Viramontes as its 11th Annual Jack Higgs Memorial Reading keynote speaker.
Helena María Viramontes
The Mockingbird, East Tennessee State University's student-created art and literature magazine, presents our eleventh annual Robert "Jack" Higgs reading as part of the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative. Professor Higgs, among many notable achievements at ETSU, served as the first faculty sponsor of The Mockingbird.
Helena María Viramontes' keynote address will be on Thursday, April 24th, at 7 PM, in the Culp East Tennessee Room.
Helena María Viramontes
Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), a novel. Her second novel, Their Dogs Came with Them (2008), published in paperback by Washington Square Press, focuses on the dispossessed, the working poor, the homeless, and the undocumented of East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was born and raised. Her work strives to recreate the visceral sense of a world virtually unknown to mainstream letters and to transform readers through relentlessly compassionate storytelling.
In the 1980s, Viramontes became co-coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association
and literary editor of XhistmeArte Magazine. Later in the decade, Viramontes helped found Southern California Latino Writers
and Filmmakers. In collaboration with feminist scholar Maria Herrera Sobek, Viramontes
organized three major conferences at UC-Irvine, resulting in two anthologies: Chicana Creativity and Criticism-Charting New Frontiers in American Literature (1988) and Chicana Writes: On Word and Film (1993).
Named a Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also
received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship,
an NEA Fellowship, a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus and
a 2017 Bellagio Center Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2015, California
State Long Beach inaugurated the Helena María Viramontes Lecture. Viramontes is Professor
of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Cornell University in Ithaca,
NY, where she is at work on a new novel.