The House in the Sand

Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean-American poet and scholar whose work focuses on social justice, feminism, and memory. Her publications include At the Threshold of Memory: New & Selected Poems (2003), The Light of Desire (2010), and I Lived on Butterfly Hill (2014), a young adult novel which won the Pura Belpre medal given by the American Library Association. She has received numerous honors and awards including a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights, a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights, the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor from the Chilean government, and the Dr. Fritz Redlich Global Mental Health and Human Rights Award. She is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American studies and a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.

Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including The Map Is Not the Territory: Poems & Translations and Just Enough, and Listening to Tao Yuan Ming. A bilingual German/English volume, Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017. Recent collections include The Things I Notice Now and The Faces of Guan Yin. His poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Clark Zlotchew was born in Jersey City, N.J. (1932),and grew up in the Bronx and in Jersey City. He and his wife Marilyn live in rural Chautauqua County in Western New York State.

Honored in 2008 with a promotion to the rank of SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Spanish Language and Spanish and Latin American Literatures, Dr. Zlotchew has had a highly diverse set of careers. He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve at age 17 as Apprentice Seaman, and received an Honorable Discharge as Chief Petty Officer at age 36. He was sales/production liaison for the export Dept. of a large liquor manufacturer in New York, and was Coordinator of an educational program for Spanish-speaking seasonal workers in rural N.Y.State. He taught Spanish in high school in New Jersey, and at several universities in the states of Vermont and New York. He earned the Ph.D. in Romance Languages & Literatures from SUNY Binghamton.

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author born in Argentina, whose books have been published in over fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. His novels, poetry, essays, plays, stories and screenplays have won numerous awards. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. His most recent books are a collection of essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World and the forthcoming novel, Darwin’s Ghosts. He contributes to major papers worldwide, including frequent contributions to The New York Times and the New York Review of Books Daily. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, Index on Censorship and many other magazines and journals. A prominent human rights activist, he lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

Pablo Neruda is regarded as the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, his breadth of vision and wide range of themes are extraordinary, and his work continues to inspire new generations of writers.