Join us as we welcome Keila Vall de la Ville, Robin Myers & Antonio Díaz Oliva (ADO) in for a virtual conversation about Latinx representation in literature and what it means to create bilingual characters on the page in celebration of Keila Vall de la Ville’s The Animal Days, translated by Robin Myers.
**This event will be streamed via YouTube Live. Register in advance to receive a link to view to be sent to you the day of the event. **
The Animal Days, a story of movement as both a lifestyle and a rite of passage, follows Julia’s journey of love and rock-climbing across three continents. In this fast-paced novel, joy is linked to self-destruction, love is inseparable from death, freedom is twinned with unbearable solitude, and life is worth only as much as a given moment. Julia, determined to never look back, lives perpetually on the brink, even if it means shedding her own skin in the process.
Keila Vall de la Ville is a New York-based Venezuelan author, mother, and rock climber. Her novel Los días animales received the 2018 International Latino Book Awards and was translated into English as The Animal Days in 2021 by Katakana editores. She is also the author of several short story collections, including Ana no duerme, a finalist for Best Fiction Book in National Short Story Awards Monte Ávila Editores, Venezuela. She has published the poetry book Viaje legado and edited the bilingual anthology Between the Breath and the Abyss: Poetics on Beauty, a compilation of essays and poems by thirty-three contemporary poets. Forthcoming in the spring of 2022 is De cuando Corre Lola Corre dejó sin aire a Murakami. She studied anthropology and political science in Venezuela and has an MFA in creative writing from New York University, and an MA in Hispanic cultural studies from Columbia University.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based translator and poet. Recent and forthcoming translations include Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (Charco Press), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville (Katakana Editores, 2021), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books, 2020), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She writes a monthly column on translation for Palette Poetry.
ADO (Antonio Díaz Oliva) is the author of the non-fiction book Piedra Roja: El mito del Woodstock chileno, the novel La soga de los muertos, the short story collections La experiencia formativa, La experiencia deformativa and Las Experiencias. He is also the editor of the anthologies 20/40 and Estados Hispanos de América: Nueva Narrativa Latinoamericana Made in USA. He received the Roberto Bolaño Young Writers Award, the National Book Award by the National Book Council of Chile, and he was a finalist for the Michael Jacobs Travel Writing Award by The Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation. His journalism and essays have been published in Qué Pasa, Rolling Stone, La Tercera, Gatopardo, Letras Libre, and El Malpensante. He has been awarded fellowships from New York University, the Foundation for a New Ibero American Journalism (FNPI), Fulbright, and the Council for Culture and the Arts in Chile. He has worked as a journalist, translator, ghostwriter, interpreter, and university professor in Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, Washington DC, East Nashville, and New York. He currently lives in Chicago. Forthcoming is Campus, to be published by Chatos Inhumanos, a bilingual publishing house in New York.