Lecture
Lecture: Mourning in a Foreign Tongue
- Cristina Rivera Garza
- Date
- Thursday 5 November 2026
- Time
- Explanation
- Registration required.
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.28
Drawing on the writing of Liliana’s Invincible Summer in Spanish and English, Cristina Rivera Garza examines how moving between languages can make it possible to speak about devastating loss. Her reflection on writing in “translation mode” connects the experience of grief with the unequal relations between English and Spanish and the work of bilingual writers in the United States. She considers how another language can become a place of refuge, and how linguistic vulnerability shapes the possibilities of writing.
About the speaker
Cristina Rivera Garza is a Mexican writer, historian, and professor whose work moves across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and experimental writing. She won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography for Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice. Her many honors also include a MacArthur Fellowship and two Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prizes. Her books in English include The Iliac Crest, The Taiga Syndrome, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, Death Takes Me, Autobiography of Cotton, and Terrestrial. Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. She is also a member of El Colegio Nacional in Mexico