University Library News Release

Date: October 12, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Jeanette Smith, NMSU Library, (505) 646-7492, jcsmith@lib.nmsu.edu

Big Read Presents Dramatic Readings by Denise Chávez and Company on October 20

The Big Read is sponsoring a gala evening of multilingual dramatic readings from the works of Rudolfo Anaya performed by a cosmopolitan group of four local personalities.

The program, entitled "Rudolfo Anaya X Four: An Evening of Readings in English, Spanish, French and German Honoring Rudolfo Anaya with Readers Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Denise Chávez, Jens Tillmanns and Dr. Claude Fouillade," will be presented on Saturday, October 20, at 7:00 p.m. at the Rio Grande Theatre.

Denise Chávez is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, actor, teacher and performance writer based in Las Cruces and Mesilla. With roots in far West Texas with her mother's family and in Las Cruces with her father's family, she has learned to love life, literature and tacos in both places. A true child of La Frontera, Chávez is the author of the recent memoir A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture and the novels Loving Pedro Infante and Face of An Angel, as well as a short story collection The Last of the Menu Girls. She has published a children's book, La Mujer Que Sabá El Idioma de Los Animales/The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals.

Also the author of many plays, Chávez is an actor who performs her one-woman shows, "Women in the State of Grace" and "El Muro/The Wall: A Chorus of Immigrant Women's Voices," throughout the U.S. Chávez is currently working on various projects including a border mystery/love story, The King and Queen of Comezón, a collection of essays, Stories from My Third World Backyard and Río Grande Family, a book about her Sephardic Jewish roots in México.

Chávez continues to explore the universal in the regional landscape and support her community through education, empowerment and transformation through the arts. She is the winner of various awards including the 2005 Don Luis Leal award in Chicano Literature, the New Mexico Governor's Award in Literature, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature and the American Book Award. She is well known locally as the director of the Border Book Festival, a major national and regional book festival in Mesilla. She also directs the Cultural Center de Mesilla, the festival's bookstore and home base, which brings literature, literacy and storytelling to people of all ages and backgrounds in the border corridor.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a poet and novelist, was born in Las Cruces in 1954. He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. His most recent book of poems, Dreaming the End of War (Copper Canyon Press) continues his long tradition of wedding his aesthetics to his politics. He received an American Book Award in 1991 for his book of poems Calendar of Dust. His forthcoming novel, Names on a Map, is due out in February from HarperPerennial, and his second young adult novel He Forgot to Say Goodbye will be published by Simon and Schuster in the summer of 2008. Sáenz is a former Wallace E. Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University, and he has won various other awards including a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, a Southwest Book Award, the Paterson Prize and the Américas Book Award. His third children's book, A Perfect Season for Dreaming, will be published in 2008.

Claude Fouillade was born in France, and he has lived in Las Cruces for twenty-two years. He teaches French and film classes at NMSU and has co-authored two books. He also writes poetry and short stories about his experiences in the Americas and in Europe. His short stories have appeared in English, French and Spanish in Canada, Mexico and the United States. His poetry has been published in journals and magazines in Mexico and in the United States. Fouillade's collection of poems The Desert from Elsewhere received an award from the Pellicer Frost Foundation and three of his poems recently appeared in Arenas Blancas. Two excerpts of his short stories, In the Desert on August 4/4 de Agosto en el Desierto and Rusty/El Rojizo, originally written in French and translated into English and Spanish, have also appeared in Arenas Blancas. His creative work has appeared in Encuentro National de Escritores en la Frontera Norte, XYZ: La Revue de la Nouvelle, Tierra Cruzada/Crossed Land and Entorno, among others. Fouillade translates his own work into English.

All Big Read events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit http://lib.nmsu.edu/bigread/ or call the NMSU Library at (575) 646-6925 or (575) 646-5792.

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