Speaker Bios
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Keynote Speaker—Sonia Manzano
Sonia Manzano: Manzano is a first-generation Puerto Rican who has affected the lives of millions of parents and children since the 1970s, when she was offered an opportunity to play "Maria" on Sesame Street.
Manzano was raised in the South Bronx where her involvement in the arts was inspired by teachers who encouraged her to audition for the High School of Performing Arts. She was accepted there and began her career as an actress. A scholarship took her to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and in her junior year, she came to New York to star in the original production of the off-Broadway show Godspell. Within a year, Manzano joined the production of Sesame Street where she eventually began writing scripts for the series. Manzano has 15 Emmy Awards to date as part of the Sesame Street writing staff.
Manzano has performed on the New York stage, in the critically acclaimed theater pieces The Vagina Monologues, The Exonerated,and most recently in Love, Loss, and What I Wore. She is proud to read short stories for Symphony Space Selected Shorts. Movies include Follow That Bird and Elmo In Grouchland. She is in countless Sesame Street Home Videos.
She has written for the Peabody Award-winning children's series, Little Bill, and has written a parenting column for the Sesame Workshop web site called Talking Out Loud. Her children's book, No Dogs Allowed, published by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing in 2004, was selected by the General Mills initiative Spoonfuls of Stories. It has been turned into a children's musical, with a productions at the Actor's Playhouse, in Coral Gables, Florida and the Atlantic Theater in New York. Her second book, A Box Full Of Kittens, was published in 2007. Scholastic will publish her first young adult novel entitled The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano in the fall of 2012.
Manzano received The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Award in Washington DC, and the Hispanic Heritage Award for Education in 2003. She received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Notre Dame University in 2005. Closer to home, she is proud to have been inducted into the Bronx Hall of Fame in 2004. She was voted one of the most influential Hispanics by People Magazine en Español (February 2007).
She was twice nominated for an Emmy Award as Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series. Manzano continues to appear on Sesame Street. Please visit her website and on Face book.
Michael Archer
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Michael Archer: Archer is co-founder and editor in chief of Guernica Magazine. His reporting, commentary, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications. He teaches English and speech at City College of New York.
For more information, visit the magazaine's website.
Fauzia Burke
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Fauzia Burke: Fauzia Burke is the Founder and President of FSB Associates, a digital publicity and marketing firm specializing in creating awareness for books and authors. From the company's inception in 1995, Fauzia has been a trendsetter in developing integrated online marketing campaigns for experts and brands alike.
She blogs on Huffington Post on topics of branding, social media and digital publicity. For up-to-date marketing news, please follow Fauzia on Twitter: @FauziaBurke.
For more information, visit her website.
Antonio Gonzalez Cerna
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Antonio Gonzalez Cerna: Cerna manages author appearances and other educational marketing initiatives at Scholastic. He is the editor-at-large of the Lambda Literary Review (LambdaLiterary.org) and previously the web producer for two web startups.
A member of the Children’s Book Council Diversity Committee, his publishing background includes marketing, advertising and publicity positions with The Penguin Press, Riverhead Books, Berkley/New American Library—NAL, DAW Books—American science fiction and fantasy publisher, founded by Donald A. Wollheim, and Grand Central Publishing (formerly Warner Books).
Lyn Di lorio
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Lyn Di lorio: Lyn Di lorio is the author of the novel Outside the Bones, which won ForeWord Review's 2011 Silver Book of the Year Award in the category of literary fiction, was Best Debut Novel on the 2011 Latinidad List, and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Prize and other awards.
She is also the author of scholarly work on Latino/a literature. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she teaches Caribbean literature, creative writing and special topics.
Currently at work on a second novel called The Sound of Falling Darkness, she is number two on the 2012 Top Ten “New” Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) list compiled by LatinoStories.com. For more information, visit her website and her blog.
Adriana Dominguez
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Adriana Dominguez: Dominguez is a literary agent with nearly 15 years of experience in publishing, most recently as Executive Editor at HarperCollins Children's Books, where she managed the children's division of the Latino imprint, Rayo. Prior to that, she was Children's Reviews Editor at Criticas magazine, published by Library Journal. She has performed editorial work for many children's and adult publishers, both on a full time basis and as a freelance consultant, on English and Spanish language books. She is also a professional translator, and has worked on a number of translations of best-selling children's books. Adriana joined Full Circle Literary in 2009, and is based on the East Coast.
Mercedes Fernandez
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Mercedes Fernandez: Fernandez is an assistant editor at Kensington Publishing, where she began her career over five years ago acquiring commercial fiction for Dafina Books, the African American imprint of Kensington Publishing.
Fernandez works with adult and young adult fiction authors, including national bestselling authors Niobia Bryant and Grace Octavia.
A native New Yorker, Mercedes loves bad reality television shows and cupcakes.
Alberto Ferreras
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Alberto Ferreras: Alberto Ferreras is a New York based writer and filmmaker, author of the award winning novel B as in Beauty, creator and director of the Habla Series for HBO Latino, and co-creator of El Perro y el Gato for HBO Family. B as in Beauty won Best Fiction at the International Latino Book Awards in 2009, and the novel has been translated to Spanish as B de Bella for Vintage Español, and Italian as Una Favola a Manhattan for Dalai Editore. His show Habla Texas recently won the Imagen Award as the best documentary of 2012.
For more information, visit his website.
Dahlma Llanos Figueroa
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Dahlma Llanos Figueroa: Llanos-Figueroa is a novelist, memoirist and short story writer whose work is grounded in the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in New York City. Her novel Daughters of the Stone, which traces the lives of five generations of Afro-Puerto Rican women from the mid-19th Century to the present, was shortlisted for the prestigious PEN America Bingham Fellowship 2010.
She is currently working on a second novel tentatively titled Women of Endurance. Her short pieces have been published in a number of literary journals including the Fall 2007 issue of at Narative Magazine. For more information, visit her website.
Elizabeth Garriga
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Elizabeth Garriga: Garriga is an Associate Director of Publicity at Little, Brown, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, where she has worked on bestsellers such as Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff and The Blood Sugar Solution by Dr. Mark Hyman.
Prior to Little, Brown, she worked in publicity at prestigious houses including Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Simon & Schuster and W.W. Norton. She has worked with a diverse list of authors including Rick Moody, William Least-Heat Moon, Sir Harold Evans, Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff and Justice John Paul Stevens.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
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Stephanie Elizondo Griest: Griest has mingled with the Russian Mafia, polished Chinese propaganda, and danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go.
As a national correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across America documenting its political history. She has won a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize, and has taught at the University of Iowa and at conferences around the globe. She is currently the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University. Visit her website at Mexican Enough.
Cheryl Klein
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Cheryl Klein: Klein is the executive editor at Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. Among the books she has published are Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork; Eighth Grade Superzero, by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich; Words in the Dust, by Trent Reedy; The Savage Fortress, by Sarwat Chadda; and Zoe Gets Ready, by Bethanie Deeney Murguia.
Her book Second Sight: An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults was published in 2011. Please visit her website and her blog and follow her at Twitter @chavelaque.
Adriana V. López
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Adriana V. López: López is the founding editor of Críticas magazine and edited the story collections Count on Me, Barcelona Noir, and Fifteen Candles. López's book-related journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and her essays and fiction have been published in anthologies such as Border-Line Personalities, Colonize This!, and Juicy Mangoes.
She is also the translator of various works in the Spanish language, most recently Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes. Her short memoir El oso y el madroño as published in Latin America in 2012. A member of PEN America, López divides her time between New York and Madrid, Spain.
Jaime Manrique
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Jaime Manrique: Manrique was born in Colombia, South America. His first three books—a novella and short stories, a volume of film criticism, and a book of poems (which won his country’s National Poetry Award)—were written in Spanish. Starting with the novel, Colombian Gold, he’s been writing his fiction, and most of his non-fiction, exclusively in English, though he still writes poetry in his native tongue. He has published four other novels: Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, Our Lives Are the Rivers, and Cervantes Street (Akashic Books, 2012). He’s also the author of the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His work has been translated into 12 languages. Please visit his website or email him.
Among his honors are: a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000), and the International Latino Book Award (Best Novel, Historical Fiction) 2007. He is a former associate professor in the MFA program in writing at Columbia University. He is currently a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages in Literature at the City College of New York.
Liz Mathews
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Liz Mathews: Mathews is a submission reader and occasional proofreader for Slice Literary.
She contributes a blog to the webpage on a semi-regular basis. She is also an advertising copywriter at Tor Books, a science fiction and fantasy publisher.
Selina McLemore
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Selina McLemore: McLemore is a Senior Editor at Grand Central Publishing where she acquires literary and commercial women’s fiction and narrative non-fiction, romance, and multicultural fiction. She has a special interest in discovering and publishing new Latino voices.
Prior to Grand Central Publishing, Selina worked at HarperCollins Publishers and Harlequin Books. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned degrees in English and Spanish Literature.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
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Karen E. Quinones Miller: An Essence best selling author and NAACP Literary Award Nominee, Karen E. Quinones Miller started her literary career in 1999 when she self-published her novel, Satin Doll, and sold 28,000 copies in less than six months. An auction was held and Simon & Schuster won the publishing rights to Satin Doll, and a second book, with a six-figure bid.
Miller subsequently published seven books through major publishing houses, but she also maintained her own publishing company–Oshun Publishing Company, Inc.–of which she is CEO. Oshun Publishing has published Yo Yo Love, an Essence best seller that launched the career of Daaimah S. Poole who has since published six other novels with Kensington Books.
Formerly a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Miller often gives Writing and Publishing/Self-publishing workshops. Her new book, An Angry Ass Black Woman, will be published by Karen Hunter Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in October 2012. For more information, visit her website and her blog.
Nicholasa Mohr
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Nicholasa Mohr: Mohr was born in Manhattan’s El Barrio in New York of Puerto Rican parents. After graduating from high school she studied at the Arts Student's League in New York where she discovered the works of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco. She then studied at the Taller de Gráficas Popular in Mexico City, The Brooklyn Museum Art School, Pratt Printmaking Center in Manhattan and the New School for Social Research.
In 1974 Nilda, her first book, was published in hardback, followed by El Bronx Remembered and In Nueva York. She is the author of two short-story collections for adults: Rituals of Survival: A Women’s Portfolio (Arte Público Press, 1985) and A Matter of Pride and Other Stories (Arte Público Press, 1997). Nilda was re-released through Arte Público's Piñata Books imprint. She has won numerous awards for her writing, such as the Jane Addams Peace Award, the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature and the Raúl Juliá Award for Creative Commitment and she is a National Book Award finalist. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the State University of New York, and the Nicholasa Mohr Reading Room at the Bronx Public Library’s Sedgewick Branch was named in her honor. She still lives in El Barrio and continues to write books for all ages.
Christina Morgan
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Christina Morgan: Morgan has worked in trade adult publishing since 2006. She has held positions at the literary agency Curtis Brown, Amistad/HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Michelle Herrera Mulligan
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Michelle Herrera Mulligan is the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Latina. She edited and contributed to Juicy Mangos, the first-ever literary collection of Latina erotica in English, which Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos called “not only a tantalizing read, but a deeply rewarding one as well.” In 2004, she co-edited Border-Line Personalities, a collection of essays on culture clash and the contemporary American Latina experience. In 2006 she received an Outstanding Contributions to Hispanic Studies Award.
Michelle has contributed to Martha Stewart’s Whole Living, Time International, Woman’s Day, Latina, House & Garden, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. She lives in New York and is currently at work on her first novel. Learn more about Michelle at her website.
Mirta Ojito
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Mirta Ojito: Mirta Ojito, a newspaper reporter, has worked for The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and The New York Times. Throughout her career she has received numerous awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editor's writing award for best foreign reporting in 1999 for a series of articles about life in Cuba, and a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a New York Times series of articles about race in America.
Her work has been included in several anthologies including To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11, Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times, By Heart/De Memoria, and How Race is Lived in America. Ojito is a graduate of the mid-career master's degree program at Columbia University and is the author of Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus. For more information, visit her website.
Daniel José Older
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Daniel José Older is a writer, composer and paramedic living in Brooklyn, New York. Salsa Nocturna, Daniel’s debut ghost noir collection, was hailed as “striking and original” by Publisher’s Weekly. He has facilitated workshops on music and anti-oppression organizing at public schools, religious houses, universities, and prisons.
His soul band Ghost Star performs original multimedia theater productions about New York history around the city.
His short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction, Crossed Genres, and The Innsmouth Free Press, among other publications. Daniel is currently working towards his MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. You can find his thoughts on writing, read his ridiculous ambulance adventures, and hear his music at Ghost Star.
Jeff Ourvan
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Jeff Ourvan: Ourvan, an attorney, writing instructor, and published author, is a literary agent with the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. Prior to his career as a literary agent, Jeff was a litigator for many years at two large New York-based corporate law firms; a communications consultant working in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo; and an editor of Living Buddhism magazine.
Jeff is the author of How to Coach Youth Baseball so Every Kid Wins (Skyhorse, 2012). His next work, Finding Buddha in America, will be published by Skyhorse and distributed by Norton in Spring 2013. For more information, visit Jennifer Lyon Literacy Agency and The Write Work Shop NYC. Accepts verbal pitch only.
Melinda Palacio
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Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet and novelist. She lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans. She holds two degrees in Comparative Literature, a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.A. from UC Santa Cruz. She is a 2007 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place 2009 award.
She is the author of the novel, Ocotillo Dreams (ASU Bilingual Press 2011), for which she received the Mariposa Award for Best First Book at the 2012 International Latino Book Awards and a 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Her short story and excerpt of her novel-in-progress was a 2012 Glimmer Train Finalist. She also writes a column for La Bloga. Tia Chucha Press will publish her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is A Story, Waiting, (Fall 2012). Her short stories and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art, Pilgrimage Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Southern Poetry Anthology, New Poets of the American West, and Mary: a Journal of New Writing.
Laura Pegram
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Laura Pegram: Pegram is the founding editor and publisher of Kweli Journal, an online literary journal by and for writers of color.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Laura is influencing a new generation of aspiring writers. Author, educator, and a jazz vocalist whose cabaret performance teamed her with jazz pianist, Donald Smith, Pegram is also a painter.
Her richly hued vibrant murals are part of several private collections. For more information, visit Kwell Journal.
Caridad Pineiro
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Caridad Pineiro: Pineiro is New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and
2012 RITA® Finalist. Pineiro wrote her first novel in the fifth grade when her teacher assigned a project—to write a book for a class lending library. Bitten by the writing bug, Pineiro continued with her passion for the written word and in 1999, Pineiro’s first novel was released.
Over a decade later, Pineiro is the author of nearly forty published novels and novellas. When not writing, Pineiro is an attorney, wife, and mother to an aspiring writer and fashionista. For more information, please visit her website and her works.
Sofía Quintero
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Sofía Quintero: Quintero is a novelist, screenwriter and producer whose work crosses genres and garners acclaim.
Quintero's latest novel Efrain’s Secret (Knopf, 2010) earned raves from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist and Kirkus, and was winner of a 2011 Parents’ Choice Award as well as a finalist for the ALA Best Books for Young Adults.
Quintero is presently working on her second young adult novel, Show and Prove.
Edel Rodriguez
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Edel Rodriguez: Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist who has exhibited internationally with shows in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Spain. Inspired by personal history, religious rituals, politics, memory, and nostalgia, his bold, figurative works are an examination of identity, cultural displacement, and mortality.
Rodriguez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1971. In 1980, Rodriguez and his family boarded a boat and left for America during the Mariel boatlift. They settled in Miami where Rodriguez was introduced to and influenced by American pop culture for the first time. Socialist propaganda and western advertising, island culture and contemporary city life, are all aspects of his life that continue to inform his work. In 1994, Rodriguez graduated with honors in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In 1998, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Manhattan’s Hunter College graduate program.
Throughout his career, Rodriguez has received commissions to create artwork for numerous clients, including The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker, and many other publications and book publishers. Rodriguez's artwork is in the collections of a variety of institutions, including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., as well as in numerous private collections.
Luisita Lopez Torregrosa
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Luisita Lopez Torregrosa: Luisita Lopez Torregrosa is the author of Before the Rain and The Noise of Infinite Longing and a former editor at the New York Times.
Her articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and Vogue.
For more information, visit her website.
Rich Villar
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Rich Villar: Rich Villar's poems and essays have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Union Station, Amistad, and Letras, and is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal.
He directs Acentos, an organization fostering audiences and community around Latino/a literature, and he has been quoted on Latino literature and culture by The New York Times and the Daily News.
For more information, visit his website.
Sabrina Vourvoulias
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Sabrina Vourvoulias: Vourvoulias is the managing editor of Al Día News in Philadelphia. She has written and edited weekly newspapers in Philadelphia, Phoenixville, and Morgantown, Pennsylvania, and Hamilton, New York. Her speculative fiction and poetry has appeared in print and online in magazines and anthologies. Ink, her first novel, is forthcoming from Crossed Genres Oct. 15, 2012.
She lives in a dilapidated old farmhouse outside of Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. For more information, visit her website and her blog.
Emanuel Xavier
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Emanuel Xavier: Emanuel Xavier is author of the novel, Christ Like, and the poetry collections Pier Queen and If Jesus Were Gay & other poems. He has also edited the anthologies Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry and Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry. He appeared twice on HBO's Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry and performs regularly throughout the country and around the world as a spoken word artist. His spoken word/music collaboration album, Legendary, is available for download on iTunes.
Forthcoming works include essays in the books For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough and Born This Way, based on the popular blog of the same name. Also, his poetry collection, Americano, will be available as a tenth anniversary revised edition in September 2012. He is an Equality Forum GLBT History Month Icon. For more information, visit his website.
Lila Zemborain
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Lila Zemborain: Argentinean poet, Lila Zemborain, has been living in New York since 1985. She is the author of the poetry collections, Abrete sésamo debajo del agua (1993), Usted (1998), Guardianes del secreto (2002) / Guardians of the Secret (Las Cruces: Noemi Press, 2009), Malvas orquídeas del mar (2004) /Mauve-Sea Orchids (New York:
Belladonna Books, 2007), Rasgado (2006), El rumor de los bordes (2011), and in collaboration with artist Martin Reyna La couleur de l’eau / El color del agua (Paris: Virginie Boissiere, 2008). She has authored the book-length essay Gabriela Mistral. Una mujer sin rostro.
From 2000 to 2006, she was the director and editor of the Rebel Road Series, and since 2003 she curates the KJCC Poetry Series at New York University, where she directs the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish.
In 2007 she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, and in Spring 2010 she was awarded a one-month residency at the Millay Colony. For more information, visit her website.