An in-depth interview with Joy Castro about her critically acclaimed new novel, One Brilliant Flame, inspired by actual events.
Set in 1886, the booming cigar industry makes Key West the most prosperous city in Florida. The city also serves as a rebel base for the anti-colonial insurgency in Cuba. Against the backdrop of the Great Fire of Key West, the novel explores the luminous fates of consuming passion and encroaching peril in the face of insurrection, sacrifice, and inextinguishable hope.
The author will be interviewed by literary critic, Isabel Álvarez-Borland, from our Literature Program, followed by a Q&A via Zoom with the audience.
This event is part of our CreateNYC Language Access Series on Cuban History, Art, and Literature. It will be held in English and will be streamed through our YouTube channel.
FREE ADMISSION
TO ATTEND, CLICK HERE ON THE SCHEDULED DATE AND TIME:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69vyyJx6l4M
To participate in the Q&A via Zoom, click here:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89526024766
Joy Castro is the award-winning author of Flight Risk, a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, which have been published in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire; the story collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award. She is also editor of the craft anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family and the founding series editor of Machete, a series in innovative literary nonfiction at The Ohio State University Press. She served as the guest judge of CRAFT‘s first Creative Nonfiction Award, and her work has appeared in venues including Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, Senses of Cinema, Salon, Gulf Coast, Brevity, Afro-Hispanic Review, Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. A former Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, she is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies (Latinx Studies) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
To purchase One Brilliant Flame and other books by Joy Castro, click here:
https://bookshop.org/contributors/joy-castro
Photo credit: Shae Sackman
ISABEL ÁLVAREZ-BORLAND is Distinguished Professor Emerita of 
Arts and Humanities in the Department of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. Her books include Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (1999) and Discontinuidad y ruptura en Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1982). She is also co-editor of Negotiating Identities in Cuban American Art and Literature (2009) and Identity, Memory, and Diaspora (2008). She is currently Associate Editor of Hispania and was Co-Director of the 2006 NEH Seminar for College Teachers: Negotiating Identities in Art, Literature and Philosophy: Cuban Americans and American Culture. She has published essays on Cuban and Latin American Literature in scholarly journals such as Hispanic Review, MLN and Revista Iberoamericana.
This event is part of our ongoing Contemporary Artists Series, and is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Legislature.
With the promotional cooperation of Rialta, 14yMedio and Diario de Cuba
