Yuri Herrera will read from his newest novel Season of the Swamp, followed by an on-stage conversation with author and professor José F. Aranda, Jr. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Yuri Herrera, according to writer Valeria Luiselli, “must be a thousand years old. He must have travelled to hell, and heaven, and back again. He must have once been a girl, an animal, a rock… Nothing else explains the vastness of his understanding.” Born in Actopan, Mexico, Herrera is the winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction for his novel Signs Preceding the End of the World which, according to translator Jason Grunebaum, is a “novel of real pathos and unexpected displacement in self, place, and language.” Herrera’s other books include the novel Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies, as well as the collection Ten Planets, which was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.
Herrera will share his newest novel Season of the Swamp, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, which re-imagines the 18 months Benito Juárez spent as an exile in New Orleans before his return to Mexico in 1855. With the historical record silent about Juárez’s experiences in New Orleans, Herrera explores how that time might have prepared him for his role as the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas. “Reading Season of the Swamp,” writes Paul Yoon, “is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty.” According to NPR, “Nobody writes like Yuri Herrera, and it would be a shame not to travel with him as far as his imagination can go.”
José F. Aranda, Jr. is Professor of Chicanx Literatures at Rice University. He holds the Terrance Doody Chair in English, and has a dual appointment in the Department of Modern and Classical Literature & Culture. Author of When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America, as well as The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948.
