Cristina Rivera Garza, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category, closed on August 30 the eighth edition of the International Book Fair for University Students (FILUNI) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), according to El Universal. In the closing panel discussion, she spoke with poet Sara Uribe.
Rivera Garza lives and teaches in the United States, where she is a professor at the University of Houston, and is one of the Mexican literary voices with the greatest cross-border reach. FILUNI is one of the largest university book fairs in Latin America; its eighth edition brought together authors, researchers, publishers, and readers over six days, from August 25 to 30, according to Excélsior. For the Mexican-American reading community, having an author who lives and publishes across both countries headline the closing session transforms the fair into a bridge between the two shores of literature in Spanish.
The conversation centered on Escrituras geológicas (Geological Writings), a volume of essays in which the author proposes reading literature through the relationship among bodies, territories, memory, and the forms of violence that traverse history. Rivera Garza argued that when reading, one rarely stops to ask how a work was made, and recounted that in her writing workshops she asks students to read Marx's economic and philosophical writings as a kind of trial by fire, according to El Universal. She also turned to the poet Concha Urquiza to interrogate the material conditions in which writing is produced, an idea closely related to disappropriation. That reading of creative processes runs through her other books as well, including Autobiografía del algodón. On the final day, the fair also paid tribute to writer Gonzalo Celorio, winner of the Premio Cervantes.
With that conversation, the eighth FILUNI closed with a dialogue between two writers who read from Mexico and from the United States. Escrituras geológicas, the volume at the center of the discussion, stands as an invitation to continue that reading in the author's pages.
This article was drafted with artificial intelligence assistance from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.