Description
Poetry. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish in a bilingual edition by Gabriel Amor. Inspired by the tale of Juana the Mad, Queen of Spain, JUANA I is Ana Arzoumanian's first full length publication in English. A hybrid genre prose work of experimental, critical historiography, Lila Zemborain describes the book thus: "This book opens with a mantra, 'What I need is a mouth.' Yet the text emits many voices, imagining the circumstances that surrounded the figure of Juana the Mad, the legitimate Queen of Spain in the first half of the XVI century, who was declared insane then silenced and confined to a convent. Ana Arzoumanian subsumes us in a dense and powerful atmosphere in which the liberated mouth unveils with an abject heroism that could be called feminine, the tensions that historical circumstances impose over bodies."
Author Bio
Ana Arzoumanian is a prolific and celebrated poet, but is or has also been known as: a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; a professor at the International Postgraduate Program in Creative Writing, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences; a Lacanian psychoanalyst; and a professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universidad del Salvador, Faculty of Legal Sciences of Buenos Aires. And as an active member of the first course of arbitration in Argentina, dictated by the National Direction of Training and Communication of the Ministry of Justice of the Nation in 1992, she was selected advisor in the Ministry of Justice of the Nation. Arzoumanian remains an active literary and theatre critic, and has traveled extensively to read her own poetry, as well as to collaborate on the documentary A Dialogue Without Borders on the Armenian genocide and the disappeared under the Argentine military dictatorship. Inspired by the tale of Juana the Mad, Queen of Spain, JUANA I (Kenning Editions, 2018) was adapted for the stage by Román Caracciolo, as La que necesita una boca. JUANA I is the first full-length English language translation of her work to be published in North America.
Author City: ARG
Born in Galicia, Spain, Gabriel Amor has lived in New York since the age of five. He has published translations of poetry and prose by numerous Latin American writers, and received a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his work on JUANA I. Gabriel has collaborated with other artists on multimedia performances and was a producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary The Woman Who Wasn't There. He is currently Program Director of Postbaccalaureate Studies at Columbia University.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA